Paris has its share of homeless people, and some of them live in little communities near the oldest bridge in the city, the Pont-Neuf. In the story, street-person Alex (Denis Lavant) has passed out along a much-traveled road, and a taxi has slightly injured his leg, which was in the way of traffic. When he limps back to his usual resting spot under the bridge, he finds a surprisingly unspoiled young woman (Juliette Binoche) wearing an eye patch sleeping there and confronts her about it. They become acquainted, and he learns that she is Michèle, a painter from a good suburban family who has taken to the streets in order to practice her art uninterruptedly until the time when she will inevitably lose her vision to a degenerative eye disorder. Alex earns his booze money through doing street theater: fire-eating and gymnastic routines. The two become buddies and lovers, share many adventures while practicing the arts of street survival, and even have some fun along the way. So close do they become that, when Alex is imprisoned for a violent act of jealousy, a newly cured Michèle visits him in prison and promises to meet him on the bridge when he is released. Despite this film's setting among the poor, it cost a lot of money to make: one of the big costs was the need to build a replica of the Pont-Neuf. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
Review
Straddling a fine line between greatness and folly, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf might be director Leos Carax's most infamous work. Carax's crackpot epic romance seemed doomed to a cursed existence from the beginning. Starring Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche as two bums who fall in love, the movie received ecstatic notices upon its 1991 Cannes Film Festival premiere, only to meet with an indifferent box office. Perhaps Promethean hubris sealed its fate; the movie famously rebuilt Paris' Pont-Neuf and the banks of the Seine to fulfill Carax's grandiose vision. Three years in the making and three times over budget, Les Amants is the most extravagant expression of Carax's pet theme of l'amour fou. Unhindered by intellectual concerns, Les Amants is a purely instinctive act of filmmaking. Transfixed by the sublime (and skirting dangerously close to the ridiculous), the movie betrays a belief in cinema as a purely visceral medium. The apotheosis of Carax's heedless approach is a jaw-dropping Bastille Day set piece: the two lovers dance, scream, and cavort against a backdrop of fireworks and a cacophony of rap, classical, and dance music. It's a defining moment in Carax's canon, and, some might argue, a high that the movie never fully recovers from. For all its flaws, this unabashedly whimsical movie sustains, if unevenly, its exuberant vision. Reckless, excessive, and seized of millennial delirium, Carax's valentine to Paris may be remembered as one of the epochal movies of 1990s world cinema. ~ Elbert Ventura, All Movie Guide
