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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
French filmmaker Lios Carax romanticizes the sleaze and squalor of Paris street life.
Jun 29, 1999 | Lios Carax is nothing if not ambitious. He's trying to place himself in a lineage with the two great Jeans of French cinema, Renoir and Vigo. He wants "The Lovers on the Bridge" to be a defining work of doomed romantic fatalism, the mood of many of the most famous French films of the '30s. And he also appears to be trying to evoke the mixture of sleaze and enchantment that characterized the work of the great Hungarian photographer Brassao in his books "Paris By Night" and "The Secret Paris of the '30s." Some movies are filigreed with poetic conceits. Carax's "The Lovers on the Bridge" is nothing but poetic conceits. Pare them away and there's nothing left underneath. Carax appears to have made the movie under the influence of pixie dust and rotgut. He has a woozy head and artfully placed dirt under his fingernails. The movie is what might result if you lavished money on a film student and told him to adapt a Bukowski short story in the style of a third-rate imitator of Jacques Demy.
Nuts as it is, "The Lovers on the Bridge" is also somewhat legendary. The movie debuted in France in 1991, though it is only now getting released here under the auspices of Martin Scorsese through the Miramax division Zok. It had a famously troubled production that stretched the shooting schedule and sent the budget skyward (according to Dave Kehr's piece in the June 27 edition of the New York Times, "The Lovers on the Bridge" cost what was then 56 times the cost of the average French film). At one point, when delays caused Carax's permit to shoot on the Pont-Neuf to expire, he built a replica of the entire bridge (including the facade of the Samaritaine department store on the Right Bank).
That decision is as revealing as anything about Carax's methods. Renoir (and the new wave filmmakers who were his spiritual children) poeticized the world around them. (Think of the moment in "Breathless" when Godard's camera just happens to catch the instant at twilight when the lights along the Champs-Elysses come on.) Carax, on the other hand, re-creates the world as a toy for his romantic/philosophical/cinematic musings. There's nothing wrong with dealing in artifice -- if you don't get lost in the ether. And a filmmaker who recreates the entire Pont-Neuf is already breathing pretty thin air.
There's no denying that some of his images are exquisite, but they aren't tied to anything narratively or emotionally. "I don't really write scripts," Carax told Kehr. "I make notes, and then, when we're at the point of finding the money, I pretend to write a scenario." That said, do we have to pretend that his films are about anything more than his second-hand image-mongering?
