The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)

THE LOVERS OF PONT-NEUF (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf)        A                    

France  (125 mi)  1991  d:  Léos Carax 

Only recently released, seven years in the making, the film has taken on legendary status for a multitude of reasons, long considered one of the best of the decade, yet never seen.  The Pont-Neuf bridge crossing over the Seine River is one of the most beloved historical landmarks in Paris, but based on Carax’s passion for certain kinds of shots, and the length of time needed for the production, Carax decided he couldn’t shoot there, and instead erected in the South of France a two-thirds replica of the famous bridge and the neighborhood surrounding it.  The production was halted several times, but resumed because of the interest of the star, Juliette Binoche, who was Carax’s lover at the time.  The whole thing took three years and ended up costing $28 million, the most expensive French production in history, but a mere pittance by U.S. standards, for which Carax risked his career to realize his vision.  Having now seen the film, one would have to say it was well worth the risk, as it blends the authentic with the fantastic, mixing documentary style naturalism with exaggerated film extravagance to create a great urban expressionist fantasy.  Yet despite the extraordinary style of the film, much of it realized by the superb camera of Jean-Yves Escoffier, the subject matter matches the visual intensity, using the city’s physical characteristics to poetically reflect the consciousness of its characters.

Opening with a documentary portrait of the homeless in Paris, then centering on two homeless lovers who mentally and physically are a wreck to look at, they live on a dilapidated bridge that is under construction.  The woman, Michèle (Juliette Binoche), is going blind and wears a patch over one eye, while the man, Alex (Denis Lavant), a former circus performer walks with a limp, as we are witness to a car running over his leg early in the film.  Both appear wretched and filthy, like weary decrepit souls living on the outer fringes of the world, so the story delves into what’s inside and cannot be seen, their love story evolving into an incredibly rich fantasy life, culminating in the most unimaginably spectacular fireworks display, the sky ablaze with explosions bursting over the lovers on the bridge, both delirious with joy, unable to keep their bodies from dancing under this deluge of delight, continuing the fireworks fantasia by water skiing down the River Seine, explosions like birthday candles and sparklers bursting all around them, bathing them both in streams of light, a wonderfully powerful and ecstatic vision from such tragically bleak and battered lives.

The film is reminiscent of another French film yet to be made, Olivier Assayas’s Cold Water (L’eau Froide) (1994), which is sort of a teen version of delinquents on the run searching through unimaginable depths of their souls for love and salvation, featuring a brilliant bonfire scene.  There’s a tugging reminder of Chaplin’s CITY LIGHTS (1931), and the ending, when both rekindle the love in their hearts in an underwater scene pays homage to Jean Vigo’s underwater love fantasy sequence in L'Atalante (1934), using a similar barge down the river.  Unfortunately, the commercial epic TITANIC (1997) also ripped off what otherwise would be one of the more memorable images of the film, the two lovers in each others arms on the bow of the barge.  This mental reference to commercialism is an unwelcome reminder to how much imagery is literally stolen in art, a maddening thought that unfortunately comes during the very climax of this film.  

Another disturbing thought that continuously haunts the viewer afterwards is the reprehensible behavior of Alex, the manipulating and conniving male lover in the film, certainly a tortured soul in his own right.  It is impossible not to be reminded of that, where one realizes these are homeless people who live on the verge of the irrational, a separate universe from our own, but it turns out the coldest, bleakest, most hideous aspect of the film is his purposeful act to keep her blind, to keep her helpless and homeless, to maintain her need for him at all costs, no matter the price.  One can’t help but think of the cliché, love is blind, I would do anything for love, but this is such a typical, self-serving act of male misogyny on such a high order that it is impossible not to shiver with disgust.  One must ask themselves, what is that doing in this film?  And we’re left to believe that urban homelessness on the deteriorating bridge stands for the state of moral decay, the crumbling of what was once the pillars, the foundation of society, signs of a deteriorating moral order that leaves us with the Neanderthal cave man who has always been there, but has now disguised himself in civilization with clean pants and a close shave.  Leave it to the French to describe:  woe is me, what a weary state is man.  Despite the fact the bridge can be rebuilt, the love rekindled, the homelessness and decay remain, even if it’s not seen.  It’s almost as if Carax is saying, only in your imaginations can you be free, as the world and the people in it care nothing about you.  And we are left with this troublesome thought at the end of this hauntingly intense and beautiful film rather than caught up in the rapture of romance, quite a bleak contrast from the wondrous optimism of the Vigo film.

Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood)

MAUVAIS SANG (Bad Blood)          A                    

aka:  The Night Is Young

France  (116 mi)  1986  d:  Léos Carax 

Do you believe in love that comes quickly, that strikes quickly, but which lasts forever?    

—Alex (Denis Lavant)

A gangster film told using bold primary colors which, like his earlier film Boy Meets Girl (1984), is another modern take on the irrepressibility of romanticism that so often leads to the impossibility of love.  Made when Carax was having an affair with Juliette Binoche, this is largely written for her, as it is another dreamlike idealization of forbidden love.  While many of the French New Wave films dealt with the anguish of love, where Truffaut’s work in particular is full of pain, loss and unrequited love, more seemed inspired by the existential angst of modern youth, filled with carefree moments of risk taking and rebellion, often leading to heartbreak and senseless tragedy, where Godard’s BREATHLESS (1960), BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964), or PIERROT LE FOU (1965) spring to mind.  While Carax was obviously inspired by these early Nouvelle Vague films, his real interest seems to be Silent films, where like Guy Maddin, his central focus is examining the hidden layers under the surface, often revealed through an experimental or surrealist visual style that uncovers darkly contained fantasies or fears.  One of the unsung gems of 1980’s cinema, what Carax brings to the screen is an explosion of raw emotion, shot once more by Jean Yves Escoffier, but rather than the morbid black and white obsession of his earlier effort, he uses color as an extension of emotional discovery, where a seductive thread runs throughout the film, as the story follows the romantic exploits of the director’s alter-ego Alex (Denis Lavant).  Initially Alex is smothered by the love of a beautiful young teenage girl Lise, Julie Delpy in one of her earliest film appearances, who remains infatuated with him even as he attempts to abandon her, literally running away at first, hoping to get a new start in life.  But in his head, Lise is a constant presence, like the picture of innocence, where she never really goes away, and he continues to address her throughout the film in dreams and voiceovers. 

One of the more intriguing aspects of the opening is Alex’s answering machine which plays the bombastic opening theme of Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet Dance of the Knights YouTube (3:17).  The film quickly delves into a film noir thriller populated by underworld characters, but only out of reverence to an earlier era of cinema.  After receiving word his father has been killed under mysterious circumstances, perhaps by the American, the aging and decrepit looking Carroll Brooks from his previous film, Alex falls in with his father’s old gang, led by Michel Piccoli as Marc, a father figure who remembers him as a child, when he interestingly refused to talk, preferring to remain silent, developing the nickname “Tongue Tied.”  The first glimpse of Anna (Binoche) is on a bus, where emotions are elevated through a surge in symphonic music, a complete stranger that catches Alex’s eye, seen through reflected images, while the next time she is all shadows and light expressed through German Expressionist imagery.  When they finally meet, she appears like an apparition draped in red, a kind of porcelain doll that suddenly comes to life, where a young Binoche has never looked more innocently fragile or as splendidly beautiful, but she is the girlfriend of Marc, easily twice her age.  There is the barest outline of a story with Marc masterminding a criminal heist requiring the services of Alex, a street hustling cardshark whose quick and nimble hands can crack open a safe, actually taking his father’s place, where they amusingly must learn to parachute.  At the airport, Marc greets Serge Reggiani, playing a pilot named Charlie in the movie, who is interestingly introduced with Marc by greeting one another in a Silent era vaudeville routine.  Marc pushes to the point of browbeating Anna to jump out of the plane, clearly against her wishes, but she does it anyway, where she eventually faints, rescued by Alex in a fascinatingly shot air sequence shown here:  Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Parachuting  YouTube (3:37). 

Rather than follow the crime, Carax instead follows the romantic attraction of Alex and Anna, easily the most compelling aspect of the movie, becoming the emotional center of the picture.  This is all set in motion in a masterful sequence with Alex now hopelessly in love, opening with Serge Reggiani (the pilot seen earlier) heard on the radio singing “J'ai pas d'regrets (I regret nothing),” followed almost immediately by David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” Mauvais Sang YouTube (4:10), in what is easily the shot of the film, where Denis Levant, as if shot by Cupid’s arrow, streaks down the street in an endlessly long tracking shot, stumbling, cart-wheeling, eventually breaking out in a full sprint, where the buildings and lampposts go by in a blur of sheer exhilaration, one of those giddy outbursts of spontaneous emotion, running as if trying to take flight and be free.  When he returns to her, she reminds him she’s in love with Marc, remaining unattainable, but the two are still infatuated with one another, unable to say goodnight or let go, offering lengthy monologues of dreamlike nocturnal yearnings.  In Anna’s world, it grows slowly surreal where the phone rings, but there’s no sound, or she speaks and her mouth moves, but there’s still no sound, yet with Alex his voice sounds so rapturously lyrical.  In another romantic surge, to the music from Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), Mauvais Sang (Leos Carax, 1986) - Baby Steps YouTube (5:21), Mireille Perrier, the star of his earlier film, appears in a dreamlike sequence where Alex mimics the wobbly steps of her baby.   After a brief kaleidoscope of color, the screen turns silent, reassembling all the various players in the film in a powerfully original Silent era montage, a return to innocence, where Carax has a special fondness for close-ups and gestures, not to mention an underlying melancholy in silence.  MAUVAIS SANG is a hauntingly beautiful film, one where we never truly comprehend the depth of the relationships, where Carax equates the love for a woman with the possibilities of cinema itself, where like his first film, mood pervades every shot, often with a lush romanticism pre-dating Wong Kar-wai, who hadn’t really defined himself until his films of the 90’s.  But the visual expression and stylized composition in this film often veer toward moments of ecstasy, including the final shot, another lengthy sequence where running continues to suggest the possibilities of flight, freedom, escape, or perhaps even a metamorphosis.    

Boy Meets Girl

BOY MEETS GIRL                 B    
France  (100 mi)  1984  d:  Léos Carax 

A sad and overly melancholic film, featuring indulgent and completely self-absorbed characters, yet beautifully shot in Black and White on the streets of Paris by Jean Yves Escoffier, but the film suffers from over-stylization, where the impressive cinematic technique on display completely dwarfs the bleak portrait of humanity, filled with downbeat and excessively brooding characters that drift through the mysterious landscape of their empty lives, characters so alienated from the world around them that suicide is a prevalent theme.  Denis Lavant begins his journey in Carax films as the director’s impulsive alter-ego, reappearing in each of his first three films as Alex, excluded for some reason from POLA X (1999), easily the director’s biggest failure, and then resurfacing again in Holy Motors (2012) as Mr. Oscar, assuming the director’s middle name.  A nocturnal film taking place almost entirely over the course of one night, the film begins with Alex abandoned by his girlfriend, where his mindset is unstable to say the least, showing a violent tendency that nearly leads to murder, directed towards the friend his girlfriend left him for, but instead he soon becomes infatuated by another girl who has also just broken up with her boyfriend, Mireille (Mireille Perrier, the director’s girlfriend at the time), who is seen more as an illusion than someone real.  In fact, it’s hard to tell just how much of this film may actually be the ramblings of an overactive imagination, where it could all be taking place inside Alex’s mind, such as this scene of Mireille, unsubtitled, set to The Dead Kennedys “Holiday in Cambodia,” where the former boyfriend returns for a brief, unintelligible conversation over the intercom, all observed by Alex,  where it’s clear this feels more like the mad and incoherent ramblings of two lost souls who are drifting apart in the night, a theme that pervades throughout the film Carax - Boys Meets Girls - 1984 - FRA (Interphone Scene ... - YouTube (4:36). 

The film is an expressionist reverie not far removed from Sartre’s first existential novel Nausea, a story concerning a man’s tenuous relationship with the surrounding city, offering glimpses into the anguish of the human soul through stream-of-conscious thoughts, as if reading pages from an intimate diary, where the writer is suffocating from a kind of existential dread where life is meaningless unless a person makes personal connections that give it meaning.  While one often feels immersed in a world of personal disgust and despair, these are fleeting and temporary moments in time, soon replaced by others just as ephemeral.  In much the same manner, Alex is barely connected to the elusively shifting world around him, estranged from friends and family, living alone in a tiny room, filled with his own enveloping interior sense of alienation and dread, constantly seen taking a drug, like popping liquid amyl nitrate, where he doesn’t so much inhabit the world as float through it in some strange and dream-like voyage through time, remaining disconnected from the world he lives in, as if unable to be a part of it.  People don’t converse so much as offer long and rambling monologues, reflective of a dreary and joyless existence where characters remain connected to some longstanding interior pain, unable to separate themselves from this anguish and personal trauma they carry around with them wherever they go.  Carax expresses this disconnection through jarring choices of music, or the use of long tracking shots, where the composition throughout is superb, often resorting to expressionist lighting, which has a dramatic effect, such as when one character is seen in sharp focus while another just inches away is slightly out of focus.      

Moody and overly detached throughout, there are brief moments that touch a different note entirely, such as Mireille pulling out a board in her apartment in order to practice tap dancing, an homage to the more playful moments of Anna Karina dancing in Godard’s BAND OF OUTSIDERS (1964) Bande à part (1964) - Dance scene [HD] YouTube (3:57), yet it’s connected to an extended sequence set to David Bowie’s “When I Live My Dream” where Alex wanders alone through the darkened night, where at one point he stops and stares, remaining infatuated by a couple kissing on the street, eventually tossing them a few coins as if this was a street performance "Boy Meets Girl" Bowie song (When I Live My Dream) - YouTube (3:43).  After a lengthy period where she exists only in his mind, Alex finally meets Mireille during an extended party sequence, knowing she’ll be there, so he crashes the party, yet is affectionately greeted with perfect bourgeois manners by the American party hostess (Carroll Brooks), before leaving him to fend for himself sitting between an elderly deaf-mute man (Albert Braun) and his gorgeous sign interpreter (Frédérique Charbonneau), insisting young people have forgotten how to talk Boy Meets Girl - Silent films were better, because... YouTube (3:18), before engaging Alex with tales of the old days of Silent cinema where he worked as a dolly grip, but Alex soon drifts off, following Mireille who’s in the bathroom, as it appears she’s about to commit suicide (we later realize she instead cuts her hair much shorter), leaving her alone as he slips into the kitchen where the hostess finds him alone, strangely confessing a piece of her heart, seen as a small part of an elongated party sequence Boys meets Girls - YouTube (9:52).  The party itself is a gloomy gathering honoring a dead soul, the brother of the hostess, the loss reflected in her quietly suppressed despair, which perfectly matches the depressed melancholia of the other characters.  Carax frames them beautifully here in an unsubtitled sequence Boy Meets Girl - Imbattable - YouTube (2:10) with Alex suddenly inspired, his soul aflame, interestingly expressed through the use of voiceover, where the film is a thinly disguised reflection of the director’s inner world, continually referencing dreamy thoughts of romantic longings that are ultimately frustrated by the reality of lost love and alienation.