Blogical Conclusion

A PAIR IN PARIS

DEC 27, 2008 – THINGS DON’T GO VERY WELL, AT FIRST, FOR ALEX(Denis Lavant) in Leos Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge. He’s run over by a speeding car, remanded to a rundown shelter for treatment, and when he returns to the bridge he’s made his address – the Pont Neuf, closed for repairs and now home to the homeless – there’s someone else in his place. His friend and fellow bridge-dweller Hans (Klaus-Michael Grüber) informs him, “Can’t figure how he got in. Tomorrow, out on his ass!” Alex limps over to check out the newcomer. He sees a sleeping figure covered by a sheet whose centre is oddly distended, straining skyward as if shrouding an energetic erection. Alex yanks off the sheet. It’s just a frisky kitten between the guy’s legs.

And it’s not a guy. It’s Michèle (Juliette Binoche). Alex seats himself and flips through a book of sketches he finds by the sleeping figure. His eyes are drawn to what appears to be a drawing of him, his mouth open, the way it was when he was on the street in pain, run over by the car. He looks at Michèle, unable to understand. The next morning he does, after Hans wakes her up with a rude shove and orders her to scram. “Move it!” he yells. “Pick up your shit! And beat it! Don’t ever come back here! Never!” Alex watches as Michèle picks up her shit and leaves. He follows her. “Miss,” he calls out. She keeps walking – so he sneaks close to her and unfastens her folder, causing the sketches to flutter out.

As Michèle bends down to retrieve her work, Alex demands, “That me there? That me?” Michèle looks up at him and replies, “Yes, from memory.” Alex wants to know where she saw him. “Took you for dead,” she says, securing her folder. He asks if she’ll give him the sketch. She refuses at first and walks away. Then she turns and proposes a transaction. “Really want it? Yes? Pose for me, right now. And you got it. A portrait.” Alex looks behind to check if Hans is watching. Then he scampers down the stairs with Michèle, and when we next see them, they’re on the riverbank, under the leafy sprawl of a generous tree. Alex sits by the trunk. Michèle sketches him.

She sketches him with her one open eye, the other hidden behind a flesh-coloured plaster patch that makes it appear that the socket is sewn shut with skin. “Don’t look at me, she instructs, and points elsewhere. “Over there.” And then her eye begins to water. She attempts to continue sketching, but the strain is too much. Like a heroine in a silent melodrama who’s just been stricken blind, she covers her eyes with her hands and rocks back and forth. She falls, and her sketch falls with her, sliding off the bank and into the river. Alex rushes over. She raises her head and calls out a name. “Julian… Julian.” Alex replies, “That’s not me.” Her head drops back to the ground.

In the hope of finding something that will help, Alex inspects her box of paints. The atmosphere of silent-film melodrama thickens, as amidst the paints, Alex discovers a gun and a letter. He reads it. “My Michèle. I’m so worried. How are you living? Where? Your portraits of Julian remain here. I look at them each night and think of you. Don’t leave me without news. I love you, Marion.” He shakes Michèle awake. There’s no response. Then, in the first of many scenes that we’ll watch with a shudder and a squinted eye, he slowly peels back the plaster eye patch. The closed eye comes painfully into view. Then Alex does something scarier. He begins to pry open the eyelid.

Fortunately, Carax cuts to a reaction shot – Alex’s distasteful wince tells us all we need to know. But as if unable to resist the prospect of toying with us – of showing us things we wouldn’t expect (or ever want) to see in a film whose title promises us a rapturous romance – Carax, for his next scene, at the market, cuts directly to a fish cooling on ice, its distended eyeball dead to the world. Alex stuffs the fish down the front of his shirt and takes it to Michèle. He peels for her strips of raw flesh, which she likens to sushi. Her kitten, meanwhile, approaches the head that’s been sliced off and closes its mouth around the bloated eyeball. Fortunately, Carax cuts away again, to the not-yet-lovers on the bridge, whose love story is about to begin. It’s just that he had to prime us with the information that this is one romance we’ll be watching not so much with a handkerchief dabbing the cheeks as a hand shielding the eyes.

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