Lios Carax is nothing if not ambitious. He's trying to place himself in a lineage with the two great Jeans of French cinema, Renoir and Vigo. He wants "The Lovers on the Bridge" to be a defining work of doomed romantic fatalism, the mood of many of the most famous French films of the '30s. And he also appears to be trying to evoke the mixture of sleaze and enchantment that characterized the work of the great Hungarian photographer Brassao in his books "Paris By Night" and "The Secret Paris of the '30s." Some movies are filigreed with poetic conceits. Carax's "The Lovers on the Bridge" is nothing but poetic conceits. Pare them away and there's nothing left underneath. Carax appears to have made the movie under the influence of pixie dust and rotgut. He has a woozy head and artfully placed dirt under his fingernails. The movie is what might result if you lavished money on a film student and told him to adapt a Bukowski short story in the style of a third-rate imitator of Jacques Demy.
Nuts as it is, "The Lovers on the Bridge" is also somewhat legendary. The movie debuted in France in 1991, though it is only now getting released here under the auspices of Martin Scorsese through the Miramax division Zok. It had a famously troubled production that stretched the shooting schedule and sent the budget skyward (according to Dave Kehr's piece in the June 27 edition of the New York Times, "The Lovers on the Bridge" cost what was then 56 times the cost of the average French film). At one point, when delays caused Carax's permit to shoot on the Pont-Neuf to expire, he built a replica of the entire bridge (including the facade of the Samaritaine department store on the Right Bank).
That decision is as revealing as anything about Carax's methods. Renoir (and the new wave filmmakers who were his spiritual children) poeticized the world around them. (Think of the moment in "Breathless" when Godard's camera just happens to catch the instant at twilight when the lights along the Champs-Elysses come on.) Carax, on the other hand, re-creates the world as a toy for his romantic/philosophical/cinematic musings. There's nothing wrong with dealing in artifice -- if you don't get lost in the ether. And a filmmaker who recreates the entire Pont-Neuf is already breathing pretty thin air.
There's no denying that some of his images are exquisite, but they aren't tied to anything narratively or emotionally. "I don't really write scripts," Carax told Kehr. "I make notes, and then, when we're at the point of finding the money, I pretend to write a scenario." That said, do we have to pretend that his films are about anything more than his second-hand image-mongering?
In film critics' circles, Carax has, for some time, been well on his way to assuming the mantle of doomed, poetic genius. Here's critic Jonathan Rosenbaum in Film Comment: "A delirious and lyrical form of nonnarrative consisting of cascading and overlapping poetic conceits, explosions of feeling and pure sensation." In other words, don't expect much in the way of story or character. Which would be fine if Carax had chosen to make abstract films. About halfway through "The Lovers on the Bridge," I remembered that the only things I recalled from Carax's previous film "Bad Blood" were fragments: some silent black-and-white photography of Juliette Binoche; a shot of the bare branches of overhanging trees seen from the point of view of a dying man lying in the back seat of a speeding convertible; and one moment when Michel Piccoli tenderly peels back Binoche's glove to kiss her hand. And, unfortunately, I remembered the simian mug of Denis Lavant, the singularly unappealing presence whom Carax has again -- disastrously -- cast as his romantic lead.
Lavant, his head shaved, his overhanging brow more prominent than ever, plays Alex, a homeless alcoholic fire eater (I swear I'm not making this up) who lives on the Pont-Neuf, which is closed for France's bicentennial renovations. Binoche, dirtied up and sullen in the manner of actors who think wiping off the makeup constitutes taking a risk, plays Michele, an artist who has taken to the streets since discovering she is going blind. Discovering each other, Alex and Michele commence their l'amour fou of the gutter.
That setup is so ripely melodramatic that you wish Carax would dive into it and transcend his own gush (in somewhat the way Jean-Jacques Beineix manages to make "Betty Blue" a hip, risqué Douglas Sirk movie). But for all his visual excess he stays curiously on the outside of his love story. We don't feel any of Alex's desperation when he begins tearing down the "Missing" posters with Michele's picture that begin popping up on the streets and in the Metro (although to be fair, part of that is the fault of Lavant, who offers nothing to the camera). This act just seems repellently selfish.
One reason may be that Carax has encouraged Lavant and Binoche to indulge in unmediated Cassavetes-style acting, where the actors scream and laugh and emote to arrive at the "truth" of a scene. Binoche, in particular, gives a mannered, utterly inauthentic performance that I would have thought her incapable of. That acting style destroys one rather imaginative scene where Alex and Michele get drunk and the camera pans up to show them lying in their delirium among giant wine bottles.
At times, Carax seems to want an unvarnished view of the dirt and squalor of street life, as in the beginning, when Alex is picked up the cops and taken to a shelter where the director shows us the naked, emaciated bodies of old homeless men (a scene that feels like an invasion of his subjects' privacy, since Carax has no interest in them as people). But it's a romanticized view of street life he's pushing here, particularly in the character of Hans (Klaus-Michael Gr|ber), the older homeless man who lives on the bridge with Alex and dispenses dope to him so he can sleep at night. Gr|ber has the best scene in the film, the one with the most human feeling in it, when he explains to Michele the ways in which his life has gone wrong. After the flailing-around of Lavant and Binoche, you clutch at this scene, at the recognizable emotion in it. Unfortunately, the conception of the character is a little too recognizable. Carax has obviously based it on the grizzled old sailor played by the great Michel Simon in Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante." And "L'Atalante" is quoted explicitly -- and shamelessly -- in the film's climax, as Alex and Michele stand on the prow of a barge sailing up the Seine.
What rankles about the scene isn't that Carax has had the temerity to quote one of the greatest movies ever made. It's that his brand of "poetry," so calculated, so cold, has nothing of the delicacy and beauty of Vigo's. It's like listening to a one-armed, tone-deaf man playing "Clair de lune." And yet I'd be dishonest if I denied that Carax has some talent. There are images here that are arresting -- particularly Binoche water-skiing along the Seine while waterfalls of fireworks drop from the bridges, and the opening scenes: the Paris boulevards at night seen from the front seat of a speeding car, an image that conveys a sense of freedom and possession of a sleeping city. But the images are seeds scattered on concrete, given nothing fertile in which to take root.
The damnable thing about Lios Carax is that he's undoubtedly a filmmaker. He's got the eye of a filmmaker, and the nuttiness -- even as his films drive you crazy, you can't imagine him doing anything else -- but he lacks the discipline, the sensibility, the talent to engage with an audience on the most basic level and make them partner to his flights. "The Lovers on the Bridge" is one of those follies that the movies give birth to every once in a while. If only it were a grand folly, its excesses might seem forgivable, lovable.
