Film

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991)

Director: Léos Carax

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Following a spell in a hostel for the homeless after he is injured by a hit-and-run driver, fire-eater Alex (Lavant) returns to his open-air home on Paris's oldest bridge. There, besides his drugs supplier Hans (Gruber), he finds a new tenant: Michèle (Binoche), a middle-class art student who has taken to the streets for as long as her failing sight holds. Tentatively, Alex and Michèle embark on a drunken, anarchic, mutually healing affair - but she is haunted both by the prospect of blindness and by a previous, painful romance, while he is increasingly consumed by jealousy. Set against the extravagant backdrop of France's bicentennial shenanigans, Carax's tale of amour fou is even bolder than Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang. It's filled with ecstatic imagery which manages not to jar after the gritty realism of the early scenes, and constitutes a heady anthem to abstracted, mad passion: at once a modern fairy tale and a cinephile's folie de grandeur, frequently exhilarating but never wholly free of pretentiousness.

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