Genre: Drama / Romance
Director: Leos Carax
Language: French
Runtime: 125 min
Country: France
Release Date: 2 July 1999
Synopsis
Simply put, LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE is one of the most exhilarating motion pictures of the 1990s. In building a replica of the famed Parisian Pont-Neuf bridge, Carax's film became the most expensive French film ever produced, up to that point. This budget controversy threatened to overshadow the film itself, which has slowly begun to garner the proper recognition it deserves (thanks to Martin Scorsese and Miramax's American rerelease in the summer of 1999). Lavant portrays Alex, a drug-addicted, fire eating homeless man who lives on the deserted bridge, which is being restored for the French Revolution Bicentennial Celebration. When Michele stumbles into his life, a desperate, passionate relationship unfolds. Michele is an artist who is losing her eyesight due to a bizarre disease. But plot isn't the issue here. The sheer visual spectacle is. Shifting from brutal documentary to romantic melodrama to surrealism, Carax's THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE is an electric, powerful, poetic picture.

Movie Review
Extravagantly romantic and willfully overblown, The Lovers on the Bridge has become legendary in film buff-dom not only for its unwieldy mix of gorgeousness and incoherence but also for its history: Completed nearly a decade ago by then-39-year-old French auteur Leos Carax, it has been unreleased in the U.S. until now.

Surely distributors have stood behind far more addled and less fascinating artwork than this. Set during the French bicentennial of 1989 when the crumbling Pont Neuf, Paris' oldest bridge, was closed for repairs, Lovers chronicles the mad-passionate romance of Michele, a memory-haunted artist losing her eyesight (Juliette Binoche), and Alex, a derelict who moonlights as a fire-eating street performer (Denis Lavant). The bridge is their homeless home and their bridge to each other. And when sparks fly, the sky lights up, literally: Carax's most grandiose daredeviltry -- besides building a replica of the Pont Neuf in the south of France -- is a sequence in which fireworks go off as the lovers steal a speedboat and zoom up the Seine. At one point, Michele cavorts on water skis. To ask why is, apparently, to miss the boat. B

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