Depending on who you ask Les amants du Pont Neuf was either Leos Carax’s high-water mark, or the frantic efforts of a man drowning in his own ideas. Coasting on the reputation of his past two achievements, Carax was surprisingly granted access to the Pont Neuf for the making of the film. On such a set, with no less than Juliette Binoche and Dennis Lavant in tow, even I could probably make a decent film. But infamously over budget and way off schedule, Carax eventually had to build a replica of the site, complete with a custom façade of La Samaritaine in the background, in a town south of Paris to complete the film. Packed with some of the most lavish set pieces to ever hit French cinema, the film bore with it a level of expectation few films could hope to match.


Binoche and Lavant play two homeless castaways that bump into each other while squatting on the Pont Neuf during its complete restoration. Virtually stranded from society in this limbo between the banks of the Seine, they fall into a precarious version of love before embarking on a ludicrous crime spree to support their meager needs. When Alex finds out that Michele is desperately in need of a surgery that will recover her permanently failing sight, the film takes a turn for the worst. His desperation to keep her despite her need for radical and immediate eye surgery begins to erode the foundation of the haphazard Eden they have cobbled together on the bridge.


Les amants is often marked by Carax’s typical flourish. For a few minutes we watch Alex at work blowing fire for tourists, dancing with and beneath the flame in a way that only Carax could stage. At one point, the elder bum in their squat learns of Michele's growing blindness and sneaks her into a nearby museum after hours to view a painting by candlelight. And I have seen few things as spectacular as the drunken joy ride down the Seine during the city-wide Bicenntenial party in Michele skis behind Alex in a stolen police boat as an apocalyptic display of fireworks erupt from the walls for several minutes down either side of the rivers. I haven’t the slightest idea how this scene was filmed; it is an incomparable expression of emotional excess.


Les amants du Pont Neuf is about a wild and exuberant love that grows in the rubble of an unsanitary homelessness. Those who don’t like the film point to some of the more unbelievable scenes towards the end of the film as evidence of a general thoughtlessness on Carax’s part. For example, when Alex discovers that Michele's family has hired people to plaster posters all over Paris asking for information concerning her return, he sets fire to dozens of them that line the underground hallway of a Metro station at once. The sheer impossibility of Alex actually being able to do that (much less being able to find a vacant Metro station within the city limits) makes the scene cloying and absurd. But I am fine with that, as the same could be said of the entire film. At least Carax is being consistent.


And my perception of the film as a grand success may be biased. I once spent the last few hours of a summer night before daybreak on the Pont Neuf, and I can attest to the slightly less than realistic aura granted to Paris from down there between the banks.