Les amants du Pont-Neuf

Leos Carax’s Les amantes du Pont-Neuf is perhaps more infamous for its outrageous production history than for its plot. Per tradition, I too have to start with that. Carax wanted to use the renovations of Pont-Neuf, on occasion of France’s bicentennial year of 1989, as the main backdrop for the story. The producers requested access to the bridge for three months; the city gave them three weeks, which in the end Carax couldn’t even use due to a delay cause by a ridiculous injury of his lead actor, Denis Lavant: a strained tendon on the left thumb! The solution? Building a one-to-one replica of Pont-Neuf and its Parisian riverine quarter on a lake in the Lansargues, north of Montpellier. The life-size décor included everything from functional lamps and lit windows for night scenes and the scaffolded façades, in perspective, of the surrounding buildings, including the famous Samaritaine shopping galleries. The budget soon ballooned, causing the production to shut down more than once: the story goes that from October 1989 to June 1990 a single security guard kept an eye on the humongous set in the south of France.

The film took three years to complete, and an idea that started as a short black & white film shot on 8mm exploded into the most expensive French film ever at the time of release. Watching the film, it’s impossible not to think about its production, how it was shot and the legal permits, its reverie made explicit on screen, as in the water-skiing scene along the Seine to a backdrop of unstoppable fireworks—in reality, the 200th celebration of the storming of the Bastille—about which for the life of me I am yet to confirm if that’s Juliette Binoche on the skis!? Carax, probably gone mad by the beast, is constantly winking at us. However, at its premiere in Cannes the reviews were mixed, financially the film bombed, and it would take until 1999 for its North American release, and then only by Scorsese pressuring Miramax.

For me, though, the hilarity of it all is not its scale and overblown budget, but how counterintuitive the spending feels. Large-scale sets of this kind are usually built for action-adventure flicks, not for the intimate romance of two Parisian bums. We’re accustomed to seeing the Empire State Building be struck down by alien invaders; superheroes battling enemies in New York; JFK airport hijacked by terrorists; and so on. The beauty of Les amants du Pont-Neuf is the necessity of scale to bring dignity to the love lives of losers, the suicidals, and the criminals. They too deserve the impossible—that is, to dream. And dreaming is what, amidst and despite their poverty, our lovers Alex and Michèle spend their days doing. Like the lovers in Jules et Jim, they are always running! Paris is their playground and the royalty of Pont-Neuf their Versailles.

Alex is an addict and street flamethrower; Michèle, a painter losing her sight (and along with it her mind). Their only other friend on the bridge is the old and grumpy Hans, a tragic widower with keys to the city, including the Louvre, which he visits with Michèle one tender night before she goes blind: of course, they see a Rembrandt self-portrait. Our heroes are flawed people. But even flawed people deserve love and romance. It is not without poignancy that Carax opens the film with a documentary-style scene at a Parisian homeless shelter, which remains heartbreaking, revelatory, and sadly contemporary to this day.

Like in many cities, especially across the United States, or in Brazil for example, Paris has a homeless problem. Not, obviously, that the homeless are the problem. The problem is a system that abandons people, dismantles funding for shelters, and closes mental health institutions in the name of economic profit. In the 1990s Portugal was a pioneer in funding a program to support drug-addicts, opening houses to support and rehabilitate people, instead of discriminating them; a program that was then exported across the European Union. Such type of public health projects almost feels impossible today, not only for the lack of funding but also for a hateful, Right-wing rhetoric that dehumanises people carelessly.

Les amantes du Pont-Neuf ranks among the best in a long list of French romances put to the large-screen, from Truffaut’s to Jacques Demy’s, Jean Vigo’s and Jean Cocteau’s. In many ways, for its irreverent dignity and sheer magic I do compare it to Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête, a story also dedicated to the abnormal and lives lived at the fringes of society: a monster and a woman. Not, then, the reparative glee of standard romantic comedies, but the passions and the erotics of everyone, regardless of class, gender, or race.