Les Amants du Pont-Neuf

Set around the Pont Neuf, Paris's oldest bridge, while it was closed for repairs, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf depicts a love story between two young vagrants, Alex (Denis Lavant) and Michèle (Juliette Binoche). Alex is a street performer addicted to alcohol and sedatives; he scrapes together money by fire breathing and performing acrobatics (sometimes simultaneously). Michèle is a painter driven to a life on the streets because of a failed relationship and a disease which is slowly destroying her sight. Accompanied in her new environment only by a cat, she has grown up in a military family but is passionate about art and longs to see Rembrandt's self-portrait in the Louvre before her vision disappears entirely. The pair's paths first cross when Alex has passed out, drunk, on the Boulevard de Sébastopol and Michèle makes a sketch of him. Later she is dazzled by one of his street exhibitions and the two become an item. The film portrays their harsh existence living on the bridge with Hans (Klaus Michael Grüber), an older vagrant. Hans is initially hostile to Michèle, but he has secret reasons for this. When he warms to her, he uses his former life to help her realise her dream. The capital's festivities for the 1989 bicentennial of the French Revolution happen in the background to the story: while the skies of Paris are lit up with an extravagant fireworks display, Alex steals a speedboat and takes Michèle water-skiing on the Seine. Alex's love for Michèle proves to have a dark side, however. As her vision deteriorates, she becomes increasingly dependent on him. When a possible treatment for her condition becomes available, Michèle's family use street posters and radio appeals to trace her. Fearing that she will leave him if she receives the treatment, Alex tries to keep Michèle from becoming aware of her family's attempts to find her by burning the posters; but he also sets fire to the van of the bill-sticker putting them up, and the man burns to death. When Alex goes to jail for this and Michèle has surgery, the pair have to separate; then, after his release, they meet up on the bridge for one last time. Alex's love for her is unchanged but Michèle has doubts and, enraged, Alex hurls both of them into the Seine. Underwater, they gaze at each other with new eyes in a moment of connection. A westbound barge picks them up, taking the pair onwards to the Atlantic and a new life. ==Cast==

• Juliette Binoche as Michèle Stalens • Denis Lavant as Alex • Klaus Michael Grüber as Hans • Marion Stalens as Marion • Chrichan Larsson as Julien • Édith Scob as The woman in the car • Georges Aperghis as The man in the car • Marie Trintignant as The voice over ==Production==

Pre-production When he started planning it in 1987, Leos Carax wanted to make a simple film, originally intending to shoot in black and white and via Super 8. His first feature Boy Meets Girl had been a small affair (costing 3 million francs), whereas Mauvais Sang had been considerably larger and more costly (at 17 million), From the beginning, shooting a movie on a public bridge in the centre of Paris was complicated. The production team wanted to block off the bridge for three months, but the application was rejected. At this point, the budget was estimated at 32 million francs. First shoot The mayor and police of Paris had authorised filming on the actual Pont Neuf for a period of three to four weeks ending 15 August 1988 (renovation work was to begin on 16 August, so the permit could not be extended). at this point 14 minutes of footage had been shot. (In the completed film, "Christian Fechner" is the name of the riverboat that rescues the two protagonists.) It was announced that shooting would recommence on 15 August 1990. 130, 160 According to Carax, she "insisted" on performing the dangerous water-skiing scene herself (at one point in filming she nearly drowned); she also put her career on hold to make herself available during the lengthy production delays, turning down job offers from Robert De Niro, Elia Kazan and Krzysztof Kieślowski. Binoche was one of the cast and crew members who combined to pay the security guard on the Lansargues site while filming stopped, ==Release==

The film premiered at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival 260,000 of the tickets sold were in Paris alone. In 2025, the film received a 4K restoration, supervised by StudioCanal. Janus Films released the restored film in American cinemas. ==Reception==

Domestic The film divided critical opinion in France. Le Figaro praised Binoche and Lavant's performances but not the film itself. Among film journals, Marc Esposito in Studio made wounding comments about the film and Carax personally, but the reaction among what Stuart Klawans calls "auteurist critics" was warmer: but devoted a special issue to the movie. International In order to recoup its costs, Les Amants needed to do well in overseas markets. The Independent and Empire, The Daily Telegraph ("this strange, beautiful film... shows Carax as one of the most poetic, individual talents in European cinema"), and The Sunday Telegraph ("a glorious monument to the follies of megalomaniac film-making"). When it played at the 1992 New York Film Festival, however, influential critic Vincent Canby reviewed the film for The New York Times. While praising the technical achievement of Vandestien's set design, and the power of the fireworks and speedboat sequences, he was cool about the film overall: Klawans, who served on the festival's selection committee, believes that Canby's review harmed the film's USA distribution chances; Critics have however seen echoes of specific sequences in successful anglophone films released in the interim: in The English Patient (1996), of Binoche being lifted up to see a painting; Klawans concludes that, however few Americans were able to see it, film-makers were studying the movie. Richard Corliss in Time praised Binoche, and the film's visual style, but said that "The plot groans with lower-depths anomie"; Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly called the film an "unwieldy mixture of gorgeousness and incoherence". ==Notes==