"Girl on the Bridge"

A knife thrower, a beautiful assistant and a couple who just can't lose -- this lovely French film takes wing on giddy, reckless faith.

By Charles Taylor

Jul 28, 2000 | The French film "Girl on the Bridge" is a romantic daydream of a movie put together by a group of sharp, witty fantasists. Director Patrice Leconte ("Monsieur Hire," "Ridicule"), screenwriter Serge Frydman, cinematographer Jean-Marie Dreujou and stars Daniel Auteuil and Vanessa Paradis all work together to realize the sweetly silly joke at the heart of the picture: the way people in love want to live life as if it were a movie. Who hasn't surrendered to a first kiss, only to hear swelling music and imagine the smooch in a huge, screen-filling close-up?

Longing is often as funny as it is tragic, and "Girl on the Bridge" takes wing on the giddy, reckless faith that romantics give themselves over to. This is a movie that both jokes about and believes in the notion that there's a soul mate out there for each of us, and that once we find that person we can weather the pennies from heaven as well as the storms.

Auteuil plays Gabor, a professional knife thrower whose unshaven mug and rumpled pinstriped suit jacket reveal everything about his perilous state. One shave could make all the difference between his cleaning up into a success or his becoming an even more disheveled down-and-outer. One cold night he plucks Adele (Paradis) from the frigid waters beneath a Paris bridge and persuades her that if she's suicidal, she might as well become his assistant. Her problem is that she has been flitting from man to man. Convinced that each will turn out to be her Mr. Right, she goes off with one after another, to inevitable disappointment. She has lost faith that anything good will ever happen to her.

Despite his own lousy fortune, Gabor tells Adele that good luck is something you have to go out and make. What neither of them counts on is the mathematics of attraction in which two negatives add up to a positive. Together, their individual bad luck turns into unbeatable good luck as long as they remain a team. Life becomes a whirlwind of successful engagements and even more successful nights in the casinos, where Gabor and Adele can intuit winning roulette numbers. They're so in tune that they even speak to each other telepathically -- they're like the X-Men of love. When Gabor is unable to hail a cab, the pair simply purchases a raffle ticket and drives off in a new sports car. The stakes keep rising onstage (Gabor tosses knives at Adele while she's hidden behind a white curtain or spinning on what looks like a giant roulette wheel) and off (with their boodle increasing nightly at the casinos).

Had Leconte and Frydman taken this slip of a conceit seriously they might have wound up with one of those leaden disasters (like "One From the Heart" or Lios Carax's "The Lovers on the Bridge") in which whimsy strives to pass for profundity. By treating "Girl on the Bridge" as a confection, and depicting their hero and heroine (lovers in spirit if not in body) as addled dreamers, they allow us to indulge in the movie's lush-life romance without feeling foolish.

A tone of affectionate parody hovers over the film. This is a movie in which an abandoned woman (Catherine Lascault, who has a tangy mournfulness) pours out her heartbreak in the purple prose of romance novels, in which a man declares to a woman he has just met, "I'm about to faint with desire for you," in which lovers who meet on an ocean liner are so thunderstruck they set out to sea in a lifeboat. And when was the last time you saw a movie featuring capped and uniformed bellhops laden with the fruits of an afternoon shopping spree? "Girl on the Bridge" plays as if Leconte had set out to pay homage to the doomed romantic fatalism of '30s French melodramas and veered off into the American screwball comedies of the same era. The tone remains ticklishly unstable: At any moment, the movie could offer the euphoria of romantic triumph or the even more cushy euphoria of romantic heartache.

Next Page: The willingness to play romantic roulette one more time

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