ONE of the most expensive French films ever, “The Lovers on the Bridge” proved too silly and bad even for a Parisian audience, when it was released there in 1991. Almost a decade later, it’s still an empty, arid, pretentious mess of a film.
In a long, documentary-style opening sequence, a drunken and shaven-headed youth passes out in the street and gets his foot run over by a car. Alex (Denis Lavatt) is picked up by a bus full of other drunks and taken to a shelter for treatment. Eventually, he makes it back to his makeshift home: a bridge that’s closed for repairs.
Who should be sleeping in his spot but Michele (Juliette Binoche), a young woman who saw the accident. Alex lets her stay, despite the violent objections of Hans, (Klaus-Michel Gruber) a crotchety old bum who is also Alex’s barbiturate pusher and a philosopher. In the morning, Alex learns that Michele is an artist. It also turns out that she is going blind (one eye is bandaged) and is obsessed with a former lover who plays cello on the Metro.
Michele and Alex don’t say much. And nothing about them indicates passion, desire or even curiosity. (It’s that arty, inarticulate, why-bother-with-a-screenplay thing.) But you’re clearly supposed to think that a bond is being formed when Alex shares with her a fish he steals from the market.
Sometime after, they go on one of those compulsory trips to the beach, where they finally get it on, followed by an equally compulsory ride on a Ferris wheel.
Back in Paris, it’s the bicentennial of the Republic. As fireworks go off in the sky above them, the couple gets drunk, screams baby talk, fires a gun and dances around the bridge – which is still devoid of other people, despite its superb view. Then Alex steals a police launch and takes Michele water-skiing down an empty river Seine.
After the labored incursion into surrealism, the film descends into sub-Hollywood melodrama.
Alex suddenly becomes madly jealous, cutting himself with a broken bottle when Michele spends the night away from the bridge (even though all she was doing was breaking into the Louvre with Hans, who has become nice but drowns the next day). Then it turns out that a cure has been found for Michele’s eye disease and there are posters everywhere asking for information on the runaway artist. Alex naturally does his best to keep Michele from finding out, killing a man in the process.
The whole film is filled with purposeless little bursts of artiness: Suddenly the sound is cut off or a scene goes hand-held or you see a pebble skipped across the river in slow motion.
None of it has any meaning; it’s just writer/director Carax showing off. And it serves to make the flat, unbelievable relationship between Alex and Michele (the lack of chemistry between Binoche and Lavatt doesn’t help) even less compelling.
