The following notes on The Lovers on the Bridge are written by Pate Duncan, PhD student in the Department of Communication Arts. A new 4k DCP of The Lovers on the Bridge will screen at the Cinematheque on Saturday, August 30 at 7 p.m., in the Cinematheque’s regular venue, 4070 Vilas Hall, 821 University Ave. Admission is free!
By Pate Duncan
His third feature film and the capstone of a fruitful early period for the filmmaker, Leos Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, 1991) boasts career-defining performances from two of France’s greatest actors—Juliette Binoche and Carax’s longtime collaborator and on-screen avatar, Denis Lavant—and remains among the most visually stunning films in the French cinéma du look. The film follows Alex (Lavant), an unhoused street performer battling addiction, and Michèle (Binoche), a painter with a degenerative ocular disease, who fall in love while living on Paris’s oldest bridge. Legendary for its difficult production, enormous budget, and playful alternation of cinephilic formalism and gritty realism, the film is a modern classic of French cinema, anticipating (and, at times, acrobatically outpacing) stylish French marvels that followed, such as La Haïne (Matthieu Kassovitz, 1995) or Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001). Presented in a new 4K restoration by Janus Films, The Lovers on the Bridge has never looked more lovely.
Carax began his directorial career with the moody 1980 short film Strangulation Blues, there already evincing the nocturnal romanticism that runs through his work even into his most recent films. During this period, changes in the French film industry situated Carax in a specific cultural market of shifting industrial mandates and audience expectations. In the mid-1970s, France reformed its censorship laws around film, leading to the emergence of both pornographic films and even more explicit sexuality in mainstream narrative films. At the same time, France broke up and privatized its television industry, which increased the importance of television as an avenue for financing French cinema and opened the floodgates of American television to French audiences. This influence from American filmmaking and television helped craft the cinéma du look, a glossy, stylish, frenetic cinema that revels in genre play and self-consciously pretty imagery, typified by Luc Besson’s films Subway (1985), The Big Blue (1988), and La Femme Nikita (1990).
While the French industrial value of diversité—an ecology of diverse types of films within the French marketplace—allowed for heady experimentation from the likes of established auteurs like Jean-Luc Godard and Marguerite Duras, television competition also dovetailed with more commercial and less academic tastes from audiences. Comedies, such as Bertrand Blier’s Going Places (1974), the Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), and Buffet Froid (1979), increased in importance in both arthouse and popular fare. Realism, stylized exquisitely by Maurice Pialat and the Dardennes, crystallized as a practice and linked to earlier traditions in French film history. Meanwhile, the “heritage film” emerged through official state support for conspicuously French period pieces and literary adaptations like Claude Berri’s 1986 diptych of Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring and Claude Chabrol’s Madame Bovary (1991). Temporally and stylistically far from the glory days of the French New Wave, French audiences and the French film industry responded to globalizing industrial changes through both a syncretic incorporation of American audiovisual styles and through a compensatory reassertion of the importance of French cultural classics.
This background is in part what makes Leos Carax’s work stand out as fresh, both today and in its contemporary moment. His visuals are stylized in a manner somewhat close to the cinéma du look, but there is a youthful élan and bevy of references that make his films feel much closer to the New Wave, substituting David Bowie and glam rock for the New Wave’s jazz. His films have moments that might connote realism, but this principle is relativized by his distinctive visual stylization, playful motivation of seemingly nondiegetic music, and, especially in his later works, dreamlike and absurdist elements. He calls back to certain French traditions, but they are far more likely to be citations of the austere decoupage of Robert Bresson or the primary colors of Godard than stuffy literary classics. Carax’s work is beautiful in its own right, but part of the appeal is seeing how cannily he plays to and subverts the demands of his film-historical moment.
His debut feature, Boy Meets Girl (1984), features exquisite black-and-white cinematography and outré set pieces of Denis Lavant wandering about with headphones on in a trance-like state, exemplifying the type of male protagonist that litters canonical New Wave films. Carax’s second feature, Mauvais Sang (1986), also starring Binoche and Lavant, rearticulates Godardian color palettes and seems to blend hallmarks of the emergent cinéma du look with a definitive point of view appreciable for critics weaned on auteur theory. Mauvais Sang garnered Carax the coveted Prix Louis-Delluc and is probably Carax’s most recognizable film for anglophone audiences, even if they’ve never seen it: it gives us the famous tracking shot of Lavant sprinting to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” a sequence cited in works as disparate as Noah Baumbach’s Frances Ha (2012) and Troye Sivan’s music video for “Got Me Started.” Music has remained important for Carax, as he would continue to needle drop Bowie in The Lovers on the Bridge, managed to cast Kylie Minogue in the beautiful and bizarre Holy Motors (2012), and collaborated with the rock duo Sparks to create Annette (2021), a musical starring, Adam Driver and, of all things, a wooden doll.
Carax followed up the success of Mauvais Sang with Lovers on the Bridge, which struggled to receive adequate financing and accurate location shooting on the titular Pont Neuf, resulting in an elaborately constructed set to recreate the famous Parisian landmark and its surrounding edifices on the banks of the Seine. You would never know these difficulties from the look of the final film, though. Despite these struggles, Lovers manages to balance tight narrative construction, spectacular pyrotechnics sequences, flourishes of visual and sonic style, characteristically French intertextuality with film history, and a generous perspective on Paris’s unhoused population. Most of all, the film’s central performances—captured while the two leads were a real-life couple—continue to resonate. Lavant, who had previously worked as a circus performer, takes every occasion to emphasize his physicality on screen—cartwheels, front flips, even parkour—and Binoche provides sensitivity and ambivalence here that would continue throughout her career. Not to be outdone by Lavant, she did her own stunts for the film, including the film’s remarkable sequences on the Seine.
The Lovers on the Bridge is a major work in French film history, somehow both achingly sensitive and aesthetically playful. Few films capture the on-screen magic of seeing Binoche and Lavant water ski along the Seine through a curtain of Bastille Day fireworks, but even fewer films attempt to render such a vivid portrait of early love through such a dignified portrait of unhoused people. As delicate in subject matter as it is sensuous in detail, Lovers is a triumphant achievement for one of France’s greatest living auteurs.