Leos Carax’s 1991 film The Lovers on the Bridge (titled Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in French) is not a crime movie. But it has the same framework as one: for most of the time, it is a gritty, heartbreaking story about the lives of two young homeless Parisian artists, that knowingly props their story up against the pageantry of the Paris’s bicentennial celebration of 1989; were it not for the camera capturing their story, their struggles would be lost, buried amid the rubble of the city’s self-congratulatory pomp. In this way, the film reminds me of Brian de Palma’s Blow Out (1981), in which a killer (hired by a corrupt political official) stalks the overwhelmingly ostentatious, city-wide festivities of Philadelphia’s “Liberty Day,” to tie up loose ends of a cover-up murder he had previously committed.
The Lovers on the Bridge feels like a crime movie, mostly because it is about how society churns on, ignoring its most vulnerable citizens. It is a tight love story of two young, homeless artists who turn Pont Neuf into their home while it is under reconstruction in preparation for the bicentennial festivities. It moves along, increasingly tragically and desperately, suggesting the kinds of plot pathways that might turn a narrative from a romantic drama into a crime story.
The eponymous lovers are Alex (Denis Lavant, a street performer and fire eater who suffers from alcohol addiction, and Michèle (Juliette Binoche), a painter suffering from a degenerative disease causing her to lose her eyesight. They discover one another one night, only after Alex collapses in a drug-addled stupor onto the pavement, and gets hit by a fancy car speeding through the streets. Michèle helps him on a bus that parks near them. The bus is part of a network that transports homeless individuals to a shelter where they can bathe, eat, and sleep in peace. It is a coincidence that this pus pulls up after the accident, but the attendant’s cry of “It’s Alex again,” about the unconscious and bleeding addict on the asphalt reinforces that such experiences are commonplace. Alex is then taken to the shelter, along with many of the unhoused and ill men and women of Paris, and thus, the film opens up a kind of melancholy secret world of the city. It is a world that, say, the couple driving in the speeding car does not know exists, a world that the merry celebrators of Paris do not know exists. But Paris, itself, knows.
Like Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949), or the aforementioned Blow Out, The Lovers on the Bridge undertakes one of the great themes of crime cinema: the relationship between the city and the subject, chronicling the figures who know the tunnels and alleyways and crowds and other nooks and crooks of its architecture and infrastructure, who can slip in and out of its shadows. But Lovers on the Bridge asks a kid of reality of that framework, rather than a mystery. The people slipping in and out of the consciousness of the city are not thieves or murders, but ordinary people that the rest of the citizenry would prefer to forget.
The film constantly reinforces that Paris has historically, and quite literally, been built on and cannot be regarded without its poorer citizens, and turns one of the most central and famous spots in Paris into a peripheral space, precisely facilitating the alienation of such marginalized individuals from the culture they live in as equally as everyone else. The film simmers in a sense of despair and fruitlessness, from there.
Real Paris, the film argues, cannot be truly seen without a movement past the architectural grandeur into the grim, heartbreaking social skeleton. When Alex arrives at the shelter, the diegetic noise of layers and layers of voices (some groaning and some talking loudly) gives an endless, and powerful, quality to the homeless population, reinforcing that this place is in fact made up of thousands of voices (hinting too, at the thousands of more who don’t happen to be present at this particular clinic).
The transfer of bodies from the dark light of the bus to the bright lights of the clinic (and the close-up shots during the bus to either the extreme close-up shots or the perfectly framed medium shots taken in the clinic itself) allows for a kind of double-take; the dark cinematography on the ride over, which allows arms and legs to be visible, but obscured, provides a kind of shroud over these peoples; the intrusive, exposing light of the clinic, under which many of the homeless men and women strip down for their showers, is an intense verification that not only are the horrible sights on the bus real, but worse than originally indicated. The goals of the film are established in this very scene: the problem of marginalization of people in a city that belongs to everyone, equally. Why are these unhoused people forced to pay for taking up space in a city of space?
These shots are cramped and documentary-style, captured by a quivering camera—and show people lying in a shower basin or squeezed into a seat. These performers are not actors, but people who genuinely live in these conditions, paid by the film to provide verisimilitude and truth.
Additionally, the shots of the homeless individuals both on the dark bus and in the grainy light of the shelter are long close-ups concentrated on body parts: limbs and spines supporting bodies that are decaying, breaking, bandaged, or deformed from exposure to the elements for so long (as is the Pont-Neuf bridge, on which Alex, and eventually Michèle, make their home). These shots not only dismember Paris’s homeless (dehumanizing these most urban inhabitants), but contribute to the argument that these are the arms and legs of Paris—having built it, and currently standing it up.
Paris is a city build on the bones of its citizens; a walk through the Catacombes, the macabre Roman tunnels under the city which were repurposed after the French Revolution as decorative mass graves for those who perished in political skirmishes or who died in hospitals… as well as bones removed from the overflowing outdoor urban graveyards from centuries before. Molière’s bones are somewhere in the Catacombes, scattered apart, side by side with those of other now-nameless individuals of all classes, educations, ages, and races. Through its editing, The Lovers on the Bridge offers a similar intervention.
But Paris is also known for the splendor of its buildings and the beautiful, grid-like organization of its buildings (the result of an 1860’s dream of renovation by Georges Haussmann, which involved the forced renovation of numerous districts, destruction of poorer buildings, and, notably, the creation of homelessness for many individuals who had homes that interfered with his vision). Michèle, elegant and from a well-to-do family who is desperate to locate her, is a painter. Paris, historically and rather stereotypically, welcomes painters. [SPOILERS AHEAD] Alex, on the other hand, is a fire-breather, a street performer; his artistic trade is unknown to the historic grandeur of the city, and while this shows how the city has grown from within itself to create new things, the juxtaposition of Alex’s ending (which involves reformation due to time in jail) with Michèle’s, which involves her restoration to a well-to-do status and potential marriage to a wealthy and educated surgeon, indicates how Paris has automatically accepted her back.
She is a representation of wayward traditionalism, and Alex represents an inherent blight of unconventionality that the city seeks to correct in order to improve its image. The film might careen into a crime plot now, but it holds itself back; concentrates instead on the tragedy inherent in the ordinary, rather than extending it to violent metaphor. As a result, The Lovers on the Bridge hits as hard as any noir.
