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Les Amants du Pont-Neuf
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Sensorium
Whenever
the light is low and a bad smell wafts in from the garbage on the street, I
remember one of my favourite grunge movies: Les
Amants du Pont-Neuf, by the punk wunderkind Leos Carax. He’s a filmmaker
who knows his grunge history of art, and is unafraid to display that knowledge.
This history pours out of his film like blood from an open artery. All the
French poets who wandered the streets and yearned for the mud are here,
including the Surrealists. The ghosts of those delightful, anarchic tramps and
eccentric outsiders of 1930s French cinema are here, too, like those that
Michel Simon played in Boudu Saved From
Drowning (1932) and L'Atalante (1934) – Carax has joked that he
would cast Simon if he was still around. All of our contemporary screen icons
are here, as well, the ones who loved and lost, smirked and struck a pose as they
hit the pavement in their closing scene: Jean-Paul Belmondo in Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1960), Hanna Schygulla in R.W. Fassbinder’s films, Pedro Almodóvar’s
camp queens following their melodramatic desires unto death. Plus Charles Bukowski
and Jean Genet and Leonard Cohen, somewhere evoked or echoed or in Carax’s rich
flow of images and sounds; it all ends with the glorious anthem of Les Rita
Mitsouko, “Les Amants”.
The
initial trick of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is simple but astonishing. It starts right in the gutter, looking like a documentary
on homeless people in Paris. We see them rounded up in vans, put in showers,
fed and then thrust back out onto the streets. At a certain moment, Carax
flicks a switch: his main bum, Alex, played by his favourite, acrobatic, fire-eating
actor Denis Lavant, sees a magnificent woman (Juliette Binoche as Michèle) living
by her wits on the Pont-Neuf bridge. So he falls in love, and starts floating
on air. Poetry fills the soundtrack; fireworks, literally, fill the screen.
There’s dancing and swimming and snowflakes; all kinds of rapturous events
happen in the lives of these two streetwise nobodies.
All
the while, naturally, we know better; we know that they are star-crossed
romantics, and there are dreadful hints of sickness and madness shadowing their
impossible love story. But it doesn’t matter; the film has proven that it can
transport you back and forth between the gutter and the stars, between reality
and dream, in the blink of an edit; and it has found a perfect way of combining
the most hopelessly pining, sentimental innocence and the grungiest decadence
and decay. This is an intoxicating mixture for all us modern, underground
lovers.
When
Philippe Garrel was asked at the dawn of the 1990s why he made films, he
replied: “I make them for Jean-Luc Godard, for Leos Carax”. Godard, the ageing
Nouvelle Vague icon, is a familiar culture hero. But who is Carax? In Europe,
he is – or was, for a time, given the fickleness of fashion – a phenomenon. The
movies he made in the ‘80s, Boy Meets
Girl (1984) and Mauvais sang (1986), are vibrant, stylish and confronting. Critics could not decide whether
he was merely the most bombastic artist of the rock video generation – lazily
clasping him to the cinéma du look associated with the likes of Jean-Jacques Beineix and Luc Besson – or the
rightful heir to Godard’s bold cinematic modernism. But Carax’s potent
combination of punk nihilism, flamboyant romanticism and audiovisual
pyrotechnics immediately struck a chord with authentically cult-seeking
audiences.
Les Amants du
Pont-Neuf arrived with a behind-the-scenes production legend that threatened to be almost
more spectacular than the film itself. Like Francis Ford Coppola with One From the Heart (1982), Carax gave
birth to a monster, a “folly” that he fought hard to control. (It is duly
included in Stuart Klawans’ colourful 1999 book Film Follies: The Cinema Out of Order.) Shooting was halted twice
over a three-year period, and at one point the Pont-Neuf bridge (on which most
of the story is set), when the real thing was no longer available for the
shoot, had to be reconstructed as a set – with its surrounding vista of Paris
included. Having finally chalked up the highest budget in French cinema history
to that date – and then failing to conquer the international arthouse market –
Carax haughtily announced that he would never work in his home country again.
It took him the better part of a decade to return to the screen with the cryptic,
badly received, extremely intriguing Pola
X (1999, reconfigured in 2001 as a TV mini-series titled, as per Herman
Melville’s source novel, Pierre ou les
ambiguïtés). His career then went into limbo again for the better part of a
decade.
Beyond
its gossipy legend, Les Amants du
Pont-Neuf is a truly amazing film, and in retrospect one of the key films
of the ‘90s – an epic of love, art, death and crazy camera angles that recalls
the similarly grand folly of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) – an extravagant, unforgettable testament. Yet its subject is not one of
the grand events of history such as Gance tackled; taking a populist path,
Carax focuses on a tortured love affair between two anonymous, battered
outcasts. Michèle is the artist fleeing from a bourgeois home and a broken
relationship; Alex is a vagrant and street performer, seemingly without any
past.
The
punk side of Carax’s sensibility leads him to inflict enormous physical
handicaps and hardships on these little lovers. Michèle is going blind; Alex
suffers from drunken bouts of self-mutilation. Their love, born in the gutter,
is aimed at the stars; it is as if they are frantically trying to store up all
the world’s sensual and sensory experiences before the cosmos blinks out. As
pure spectacle, the film boasts several extraordinary sequences – particularly
a lovers’ dance on Bastille night, music and fireworks filling the sky.
Dwarfing his characters with a stunning barrage of images and sounds, Carax
ultimately transforms Les Amants du
Pont-Neuf into a declaration of both love and hate for the city of Paris.
But
I need to dig deeper into this monumental work. So: there’s an old film that’s
very precious to me, a very odd and singular masterpiece titled Peter Ibbetson (1935), starring Gary
Cooper as the titular seeker-hero. In its ethereal quality of mystical
innocence, it could almost pass as a film made for children – except that it
also trembles with intimations of mortality, menace and erotic attraction. It’s
basically about a man and woman (Ann Harding as Mary), deeply connected to each
other from early childhood, but separated in adult life; they then manage to
meet up at nighttime, in a shared dreamspace. Not surprisingly, it was beloved
of the artists and writers of the surrealist movement. There’s one special
scene in this sublime movie that I try to keep close to me – and close to my
vocation as a film critic.
It’s
a scene in which Peter has almost died from a violent back injury inflicted on
him as jail punishment; the pain has plunged him into bottomless despair,
causing him to doubt the superior reality of his nightly wanderings with his
beloved in dreamland. So Mary (aka Mimsy) manages to send Peter (Gogo) a little
token – a ring – that will prove to him that their mystical connection is true.
Subsequently, in a close-up of Cooper that is as softly focused and sweetly lit
as any close-up of a man or woman in Hollywood cinema, Peter opens his eyes,
gazes at the ring, and begins to speak a monologue. He explains that this ring
is more than a ring:
It looks like a ring, but it isn’t. It’s the
walls of a world. Inside it is the magic of all desire. Inside it is where she
lives. And everything inside leads to her – every street, every path, and the
eight seas. It’s a world. It’s our world.
Those
are marvellous, heady, romantic words for an American film of 1935 – in fact,
for any film of any time. For me, they express one of the greatest properties
of art: poetic mystery. Inside every
object, inside every small thing – if you invest that thing with enough
feeling, enough mystery, enough of an aura – there is the potential for a whole
world. It’s a properly surrealist idea, later given a fine, materialist twist
by Walter Benjamin: poetic art can work as a communicating vessel, a kind of
switching exchange or alchemical centre that can take us from the ordinary
things of the everyday to the ecstatic realms of visions and intense feelings …
and back again. Thus the fascination that attaches itself to the depiction of
everyday life in movies, and the transformation or intensification of that
mundane life through various processes of screen magic (including the most
seemingly ordinary, like a close-up).
This
is something I love in cinema: it sends you off, but it can you bring you back,
too – to the richness of your own world. The Australian writer George Alexander
expresses this kind of apprehension of art’s poetic mystery of art well: “Poetry
makes a quiet feast of moments of which every day is constructed. So things in
the humble kitchenette can be epic, and your backyard worthy of an archaeologist”.
Les Amants du
Pont-Neuf is a movie that seizes and overwhelms me in way that very few films do -
putting me into a state of hyper-tension that is both scary and exhilarating.
The fact that it rockets so often from décor to reality, from sheer artifice to
brutal documentary-type footage, from set-pieces worthy of a Hollywood musical
to intimate details straight out of a minimalist, avant-garde opus by the likes
of Garrel or Jacques Doillon – all that is what places the film, in my world of
cinema, alongside a special bunch of surreal and magical movies ranging from L’Atalante and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr T (1953)
to The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Walerian Borowczyk’s Goto, Island of Love (1969).
Every
time I see Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, I
think about film as worlds, as microcosmos; and I think about what Pier Paolo
Pasolini pondered to be the cinema of
poetry. Such cinema is a problem for some, to the extent that a poetic film
is not necessarily strongly narrative. But so what? There is a story, a plot,
in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf – a
sketchy kind of story, broadly drawn, which trawls though its various acts,
movements or sections the way Godzilla trawls through a Big City. As the
multimedia artist Marcus Bergner remarked to me, the Caraxian narrative here is
like a game of ping-pong between blocks or sequences as they unfold, one
against the next: there’s a dream scene, a reality scene, and then something
in-between dream and reality; the film is more like the arranged pieces of a
possible story – scattered sketches or propositions for a story-line – than
anything resembling a conventional tale.
But
let’s at least try to approach some elements of this would-be story in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf a little more
directly and conventionally. As I’ve already indicated, it is essentially the
love story of two bums, two displaced people. Alex is a seasoned tramp; as a
street performer, he does amazing things with a fire-blowing trick. Alex shares
“his” bridge with an older, larger, gruffer guy named Hans (Klaus-Michel Grüber).
Hans is a pure figure of a grunge-punk Romantic myth: he once worked as a guard
(as he tells us) for all of Paris’ major buildings and museum institutions, and
managed to keep a spare key to all of them, on a big brass ring – so this bum
has the run of the city. One day, Alex and Hans – who make an odd couple, a strange
father/son team – find themselves, their male world of the bridge, rudely rearranged
by a female interloper, a refugee from the sheltered middle-class: Michèle.
Alex and Michèle eventually become a couple of swells, as the old Fred Astaire-Judy
Garland number described it – filthy freaks in love, boozing and laughing
raucously, trying to create some physical warmth between them in this harshest
of settings. There are big melodramatic moves to follow: moves involving
desertion and betrayal, sickness and miracle cures, fire and water, sex and
death.
But Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is, for me,
more the experience of a world, a sensual world, than an ordered plot. What does
it mean to say that a film conjures a world? Sometimes this means that it
labours to give you the sense of the physical expanse and make-up of some real
or imaginary place: think of futuristic or fantasy films like The City of Lost Children (1995), Twelve Monkeys (1995), Blade Runner (1982). Carax’s
work, with its ambition to map a poet’s view of the city, has this kind of
physical expanse; its Paris is a labyrinth of Métro tunnels, a lattice of tiny
apartments, a great passageway of water and a night-sky full of the most
glorious fireworks. But, more intensely and intimately, the film gives us its
own crowded world of swiftly changing and colliding experiences, moods,
temperatures, big or little zones of time and space, image and sound tightly configured.
It’s not a substitute built-world, a “second nature” as we see in video games
or much digital art; rather, it offers a world
of experience for the viewer, a solid, endlessly revisitable container for
sensations and impressions, which is something quite different.
Characters
figure here mainly in a phenomenal, sensual kind of way: they’re not really
three-dimensional people, more like pure presences. You can hardly say where
they’ve come from or what really drives them deep inside; but you can know, at
every moment, what assails their bodies, what wounds or dazzles them, what
sticks to their skin or tickles their toes. Carax is an intensely physical
filmmaker – physical in that grotty, slightly Gothic, grunge-punk tradition
I´ve been evoking. Few films give me such a heightened sense of the rapture of
the body in motion: doubled over in laughter, dancing wildly, running or
jumping or walking dementedly with a stick. And also the poignant frailty of the
body, consumed by weakness, disease and biting cold.
When
the French critic Serge Daney, in the diary kept the year before his death,
greeted Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, he
described it not as a world or even a poem, but a sensorium – and my handy dictionary tells me that sensorium means “the
supposed seat of sensation in the brain”. So much of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf hinges on an acute loss of sensation, especially the loss of vision, since (as you’ll
recall) Michèle is going painfully blind in the course of it. So it’s as if
sensation must be sought and stored up through other means: through hearing and,
particularly, through touch.
That’s
another thing that makes this film so intensely physical: everything in it,
from a Rembrandt self-portrait in the Louvre to the trembling, diseased, filthy
body of another human being, must be touched in order to be truly taken in and
appreciated. Les Amants du Pont-Neuf gives me that kind of fiercely imaginary, almost palpable, haptic relation to
surfaces: the surfaces of a city, and the surfaces of skin. Carax gives us a
full world, a world bursting with phenomena, sensation and feeling – and it’s a
world you can visit, explore and live inside, for years and years to come.
Postscript: Leos Carax is a director whose work has never stopped inspiring me; it is truly inexhaustible. And he has so far added two further masterpieces to his collection: Holy Motors (2012) and Annette (2021). In collaborations with Cristina Álvarez López subsequent to my writing solo about Les Amants du Pont-Neuf in the ‘90s, we have returned often to Carax, and no doubt will again: see our 2013 multi-media performance “Screen and Surface, Soft and Hard: The Cinema of Leos Carax” reconstituted for this website here. © Adrian Martin March 1993 / November 1997 |
