I think it's time to drop worrying about how much movies cost and how much they make (aside from the $8 you hand over for your ticket, you'll never see a dime of it anyway), and return to praising some of the filmmakers who spent money like syphilitic princes: Fritz Lang, who nearly bankrupted the German production company UFA twice; Josef von Sternberg, cluttering his massive sets with the most grotesque displays money could buy; Michelangelo Antonioni, who took his one fluke commercial hit as a license to spend millions of MGM's cash. Can you see how ridiculous this list makes the assertion "less is more"? To cite another catch phrase thrown around with little understanding, can you imagine movies more "independent" than Metropolis, The Scarlet Empress, Zabriskie Point? Add to it Lovers on the Bridge, the 1991 French film from director Léos Carax, only now getting a release stateside. There are legitimate criticisms against the movie -- overlength, slow patches, some laughable dialogue -- but so what? They don't compare to the movie's outrageous, over-the-top triumphs.
The story, like all films that legitimately cost a fortune to make, is as simple as a fable: two homeless Parisians -- Michèle (Juliette Binoche, who's stunningly raw), a painter losing her eyesight to an unspecified disease and on the streets more or less by choice, and Alex (Denis Lavant), a circus tumbler/fire-eater whose alcoholism is threatening to go out of control -- wind up sharing a prime squatters' paradise, the famous Pont-Neuf bridge, closed for repairs during France's bicentennial. The bridge (meeting place also for the young lovers in Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer) is crumbling and sealed off, but Michèle, Alex, and Alex's protector/friend Hans (Klaus-Michael Grüber) make quite the home of it. Michèle and Alex fulfill their obligation to the title and fall in love, but it's a slow, tender process, often interfered with by Hans' stubborn admonitions ("Love takes bedrooms, not windy sidewalks") and Michèle's still-ardent yearnings for a former lover, a cellist, the subject of every portrait she left behind and which still clutter her old apartment.
How did Carax manage to spend so much money on this film? Well, he originally had permission to film on the Port-Neuf itself, but delays canceled that plan; instead he had another one built on a lake in Montpellier, one that includes the Seine, side streets, department stores and all. At least one person I know had heard of the film's incredible set and sat through the movie waiting for it, not realizing she was looking at it the whole time. It really is a marvel of forced perspective and impeccable craftsmanship.
I admit that at first I found it ironic, even typically French, to spend so much on the love story of two street people: "Give me millions so that I may salute the poor!" Reflection and a second viewing have convinced me otherwise. Though the movie doesn't skirt the hardships of homelessness -- an early sequence, set in a noisy shelter with drunken violence always threatening to erupt, is almost cruelly frank -- the story is, after all, a romance. As Alex's love for Michèle grows, his passion deepens, swells, explodes; and so too does Carax's, who sends fireworks lighting up the sky and skittering around the lover's feet as they dance to the music of Paris' celebration, and who builds a giant-sized gutter for one throwaway scene. When Alex's love for Michèle becomes dangerously possessive, he doesn't just burn her image, he sets dozens of them aflame.
So Carax's delirious extravagances are, in fact, his characters', just as Metropolis' cityscape embodies that movie's idealism, or Zabriskie Point's wanton destruction flows from the characters' dazed search for meaning. Even the necessity of re-creating the Point-Neuf, though it was forced upon him, becomes perfectly logical and just: As accurate as it looks, as meticulously detailed as it may be, there's also something unavoidably artificial about it. It's an expensive fake, a shadow of the real world that sometimes seems populated only by Alex and Michèle, a multi-million dollar playground for two. In short, it's part of what movies are all about.
