Themes: Starting Over, Age Disparity Romance, Haunted By the Past
Main Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Vanessa Paradis, Demetre Georgalas, Isabelle Petit-Jacques, Frederic Pfluger
Release Year: 1999
Country: FR
Run Time: 90 minutes
MPAA Rating: R
Plot
A woman's long history of bad luck starts to change when she puts her life on the line in this romantic drama. Adèle (Vanessa Paradis) is a 22-year-old woman whose life seems to have been a long series of miscalculations; she's never had much luck with love, life, or career, and is standing on a bridge overlooking the Seine one night, contemplating suicide, when she's approached by a man named Gabor (Daniel Auteuil). Gabor announces he's a knife-thrower who needs a new human target for his act. Would Adèle be interested? Adèle's immediate answer is to jump into the water, but after Gabor fishes her out and gets her to a hospital, she has a change of heart and the pair are soon on their way to Monaco, where Gabor gets a spot at a circus. Adèle and Gabor make a great team; he's good with knives, she's young and beautiful, and suddenly Adèle's luck starts to change. She visits a casino one night and comes home with a fortune, and even when Gabor throws blindfolded, she walks away without so much as a scratch. However, an obvious chemistry is brewing between the two, which leads to a dilemma: Gabor has a strict policy of never getting romantically involved with his partners. Will he make an exception, or is Adèle's new run of luck coming to an end? ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Review
Maybe it's the fact that star Vanessa Paradis was once a model for Chanel, but the arty black-and-white film Girl on the Bridge has the look and feel of a TV commercial for Calvin Klein's Eternity. This is not to mock acclaimed French director Patrice Leconte, who also directed Monsieur Hire (1989) and The Hairdresser's Husband (1990), but rather to suggest that everything he films is awash in stylized beauty -- even the grizzled Daniel Autueil is suffused with erotic mystery under Leconte's lens. Autueil and Paradis, the latter a French singing superstar known in the United States as Johnny Depp's love interest, forge a soulful bond that carries this flight of fancy, which moves from one exotic locale to the next in casting its dreamy spell. While the film is essentially lighthearted, and often quite funny, Paradis does some impressive work in a weightier opening scene in which she recounts her sad history to an offscreen interviewer. Autueil, one of France's richest acting treasures, matches his usual high standards as the aging knife-thrower who saves Paradis' Adele from suicide. Because nearly every man who meets Adele is instantly smitten, Autueil's Gabor is refreshing in his unwillingness to claim ownership over his stage partner. It is her decision whether to reciprocate his platonic love or to continue on her prior ill-fated path. Theirs is an affair expressed through the one-on-one intimacy of their stage act, which is shot with such fetishistic intensity that it's sexier than most physical love scenes. ~ Derek Armstrong, All Movie Guide
The plot centres around knifethrower Gabor (Auteuil) and a girl called Adèle (Paradis), who intends to kill herself by jumping from a bridge. Gabor, who may also be about to jump from the bridge, intervenes to prevent the suicide and persuades Adèle to become the target girl in his knifethrowing act. The film then follows their relationship as they travel around Europe with the act, ending in Istanbul when they get separated and their lives once again becomes luckless.
Release
Paramount Classics acquired the United States distribution rights to this film and gave it a limited U.S. theatrical release on July 28, 2000; the film went on to gross $1.7 million in U.S. theaters [1], which was a good result for a non-English film. Ruth Vitale (who was the president of Paramount Classics at that time) declared herself pleased with the film's performance in the U.S. market[2]. However, Paramount did not release the film on DVD until July, 2008.
Viens chez moi, j'habite chez une copine (1981) ·Ma femme s'appelle reviens (1982) ·Circulez y a rien à voir! (1983) ·Les Spécialistes (1985) ·Tandem (1987) ·Monsieur Hire (1988)
1990s
The Hairdresser's Husband (1990) ·Tango (1993) ·Yvonne's Perfume (1994) ·Les grands ducs (1996) ·Ridicule (1996) ·Une chance sur deux (1998) ·The Girl on the Bridge (1999)
