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LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF / THE LOVERS ON THE BRIDGE Leos Carax, France, 1991
Before getting into Les Amants du Pont-Neuf itself - I'm sticking with the now-familiar French title, which rolls off the tongue more trippingly than Miramax's clunky Lovers on the Bridge - a word about its production history and the seven-year lag between completion and Stateside release. Briefly, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf was one of the most expensive films ever produced in France: three years in the making, plagued by shutdowns, the death of a producer and an enormously expensive set that re-created the Pont-Neuf and environs in the southern French countryside, Leos Carax's epic personal gesture did not take the box office by storm.
American distributors have been eyeing Les Amants for years, beaten back by astronomical asking prices from the producers and an unavoidable reprint of Vincent Canby's crushing New York Times review. Seven years and many festival screenings later, it's acquired a semi-legendary status, buoyed by the self-mythologizing tendencies of its director, a now aging wunderkind who has placed himself in the poetic lineage of Epstein, Vigo, Cocteau, and Garrel.
Actually, there are two Leos Carax-es. There's the French Carax, a talented but self-inflated artist whose films always hold the promise of greatness but are, in the end, too heavy and immersed in the myth of the Great Director for their own good; and the American Carax, the ultimate wish-fulfillment of neo New Wave-ism, a director in love with the past but possessed of a youthful pizazz and a Minnellian gift for colorful, mobile largescale...