Leos Carax’s film Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) is pure Romanticism, as naïve as it is visually stunning, often suspending all believability and reality in favor of sequences that are representative of the main character’s emotional affair. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is effective in that there is no pretense that the world of the film is the same as our own reality. The heavy stylization at work in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf make it, along with Carax’s other films, unique to the French cinema of the early nineties.
Les Amants du Pont-Neuf opens with Alex (Denis Lavant) being run over by a car then quickly picked up to be returned to a homeless shelter. Unknown to Alex, a passerby named Michelle (Juliette Binoche) witnesses the accident. From there, Carax takes us to the homeless shelter where Alex is treated for a broken foot. With a series of fast cuts, Carax quickly contextualizes the lives of the homeless, the illness, despair, violence, and frustration. Doctors hurry about treating the dying while officers break up fights.
Next, Alex has been released, and returns to Pont-Neuf where he lives (Pont-Neuf is the oldest bridge in Paris and is in a state of disrepair for much of the film). Alex is surprised to find Michelle is also living on the abandoned bridge, and decides to look after her once he learns that she is sick. It is immediately clear that Alex’s intentions are romantic, but Michelle rejects him; she is still seeking closure from her previous relationship. Alex’s feelings are not unrequited for long, however, because Michelle locates her former lover and shoots him dead.
After killing her former lover, Michelle and Alex get drunk, steal a boat and go water skiing while fireworks erupt in the sky. This sequence returns the characters to the fantastic world of rich colors and symbolic coincidences (the fireworks) of Mauvais Sang (1986). After this night, their love affair is in full swing. Together they begin ripping off café goers by drugging their drinks, dancing at nightclubs in montage to David Bowie’s Time Will Crawl, and racing on the beach.
Then, while Alex and Michelle are walking through the subway, Alex sees a poster of Michelle instructing anyone who has seen her to report the sighting to her parents so that she may receive eye surgery that will save her sight (thus also explaining why Michelle wears an eye patch). Suddenly aware that if Michelle goes she will never return to him, Alex takes her back to the bridge. He then returns to the subway and burns all the posters of Michelle adorning the walls (this is one of the most memorable visuals of the film). Alex then sets out to prevent any more posters from being hung by burning a van full of the posters which accidentally kills a man in the process. Distraught by these events, Alex returns to Michelle on the bridge. As Alex approaches Michelle, there is a broadcast on her portable radio about the eye surgery. This prompts Michelle to drug Alex and return to her parents.
It’s worth noting that all of Alex’s efforts are in vain. Carax condemns Alex for his violent manifestations of his selfishness. In the next scene the police are beating Alex, interrogating him about the murder. In a montage, it is conveyed that Alex will serve three years in prison, and that Michelle visits once six months before his release and arranges to meet him at the now restored Pont-Neuf at midnight on the day of his release. This sequence, with all its moral retribution, returns the film to an approximation of our reality in preparation for the film’s final scenes.
The film ends with Alex and Michelle meeting on the bridge. After three hours together, Michelle says she is going home, at which point Alex grabs her and leaps into the river below. Once underwater, the film resumes it’s fanciful flare. The couple sinks, face one another, and linger as if they were about to kiss.
The synopsis above may give the impression that Les Amants du Pont-Neuf ebb and flows with stylistic convulsions, but that is not the case. Transitions from the fantastic to the realistic are carefully plotted by Leos Carax so as not to disassociate the audience. Music cues, and color signifiers are the mainstays in the communicating of these transitions. For instance, the realist sequences are notably warmer, the whites and yellows of cement convey the heat of Paris in August, as well as capture the characters in a more familiar, tangible environment. Sequences with a bit of fantasy are full of cool, deeply saturated colors, often emitting from neon signs, fire, and fireworks (recalling both Fassbinder’s film Querelle and Coppola’s One From The Heart). The fact that all of Carax’s lighting is naturally motivated is the key to its cohesive aesthetic alignment.
Alex and Michelle themselves are descendants of the frenzied youths of Godard’s Breathless (1960) and Band Of Outsiders (1964); more concerned with capturing the emotional moment of youth. The speed at which Alex and Michelle race through their relationship, the severity of their romantic conversation and the naïveté of their world view is not indicative of people as they actually are, but rather of the abstract sensations one experiences during first love.
All of the stylistic components described above point to a distinctly expressionist tendency in Carax’s film. All the visual elements of the film (location, color, framing, motion, etc) are correlated to express the emotions of Alex and Michelle. For Leos Carax, this is a monumental undertaking, especially when one considers that Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is only his third feature. Carax built a replica of Pont-Neuf on which to shoot, best capturing the expressionistic Romanticism of his piece (it’s worth noting that the two films I mention above, Coppola’s One From The Heart and R. W. Fassbinder’s Querelle, were shot on giant set pieces replicating real locales).
