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2021 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

4. Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and City Lights (1931)

Author : William H. Mooney

Published in: Adaptation and the New Art Film

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

Leos Carax’s Lovers on the Bridge updates Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. The physicality of his star and alter ego, Denis Lavant, along with admiration for the imagery of silent cinema, turned Carax’s attention to Chaplin’s Tramp. Lovers, like City Lights, is an allegory of class difference, recast because of the sixty-year temporal distance between the films. Cynicism replaces Chaplin’s naïve embrace of human goodness, and the media environment of human society has greatly changed. Lovers on the Bridge especially reflects the expanded range of stylistic options over the long arc of cinema history: Carax’s narrative no longer contains its characters and ideas but rather is roiled from within, moving beyond any definition of realism in the relationship among story, characters, events, and their representation.

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previous chapter Far from Heaven (2002)

next chapter Rewriting Roma città aperta (1945) as Das Leben der Anderen (2006)

See Kent Jones’s description of the relationship, in Louise-Salom’s Mr. X. This partnership was disrupted by an eight-year hiatus forced on Carax after the disastrous cost overruns of Lovers on the Bridge.

See Jonathan Rosenbaum: “If the plot recalls City Lights in some particulars, it is Chaplin fully revised and updated by contemporary posthumanism.”

Daly and Dowd, 1.

The segment “Antoine and Colette” of L’amour à vingt ans (1962), Baisers volés (Stolen Kisses, 1968), Domicile conjugal (Bed and Board, 1970), L’amour en fuite (Love on the Run, 1979).

Because The Night is Young misrepresents the film and has no particular recognition value, I will refer to the film by its original title, Mauvais Sang.

See, for example, Rosenbaum, and Melissa Anderson, who describes Carax as “deeply in thrall to the masters of the Nouvelle Vague, particularly Godard.”

Thompson, Sight and Sound Interview.

10.

38.

Brooks’s only other film role was as the American woman, an agent of some kind, hosting the party in Boy Meet’s Girl. Carax’s mother was American.

“Parmi les gens qui font l’amour sans aucune sentiment.” Obviously alert to the epidemic, Carax dwells on the fact that Alex and Lise use a condom when they make love early in the film. The playful treatment in the thriller plot of the AIDS virus, a “retro … virus” especially affecting the young, now strikes a painfully false note.

34, my italics.

Mireille Perrier from Boy Meets Girl has a cameo in Mauvais Sang, while Julie Delpy and Juliette Binoche, as Daly and Down write, “designed to remind the spectator of [Anna] Karina” in Godard’s Vivre sa vie, were both created as a reconstruction of her image in Boy Meets Girl. Anna, in this film, tells a story of her first love with Julien, a story developed further by Binoche in the role of Michèle Stalens in Lovers on the Bridge. Similarly, Alex’s dance to David Bowie’s “Modern Love” is developed in the performance by Michèle and Alex across the stage of the Pont-Neuf in Lovers on the Bridge.

1980s, 139.

Bazin, 144.

46 and 56.

It is difficult not to recall other well-known films in which blindness plays a similar role, such as Dark Victory (1939), or Magnificent Obsession (1935 and 1954), both of which Carax seems to reference by having Michèle become romantically involved with her surgeon.

See Daly and Dowd, 18.

This is the second time Michèle says this, the first shouted while Alex is driving the boat behind which she water skis, underscoring the new adventures he is leading her to. Her comment also echoes Emmi’s “Du bist schön, Ali,” to El Hedi ben Salem in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Angst essen Seele auf (1973).

This contrasts with the earlier scene of the Blind Girl inadvertently unraveling the yarn of his underwear, winding up the yarn for her knitting.

Quoted in Robinson, 410.

Robinson, 395.

Among the few locations shots is the exterior of the Millionaire’s mansion, a building on Wilshire Boulevard. Robinson, 408.

For fuller analysis of the stone/water juxtaposition see Cristina Álverez López and Adrian Martin, “Water and Stone,” a video essay on the Lovers on the Bridge DVD.

200.

Sight and Sound, 46.

These opening scenes led critics and audiences to expect the film to address homelessness in a more immediate way, inspiring attacks on the film that in addition to Carax’s excesses, condemned the film for exploiting the homeless in a sensational and frivolous story peopled by a movie star like Binoche. See Graeme Hayes, in Powrie 1990s, 199.

Stars, 243. For Vincendeau, the Carax-Binoche partnership has elements of deliberate myth-making, in which she functions as “beautiful female ‘object’ within a long iconic tradition, and as a ‘subject’ who focalizes the auteur’s philosophical and aesthetic preoccupations. … There have been precedents for this kind of creative partnership, some of which were explicit models for Carax, especially Griffith and Lillian Gish and Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina. The Godard-Karina partnership was particularly important, because their relationship was both sexual and professional.” (244) In Binoche, Carax “found, and helped construct, a star who summed up the seductive paradox of his mise-en-scene: a smooth youthful surface hiding romantic passion.” (246)

One could argue that the Tramp/Blind Girl relationship is entirely reversed, with Michèle mentoring the asocial, barely literate outsider Alex, but this distorts a more complexly reconfigured relationship.

Identified as his mirror stage by psychoanalytic critics: see for example, Hayes, 202–203.

Chaplin’s comic naming of an Austrian physician “Dr. von Bier” is replaced by Carax’s naming his doctor after Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose surname at birth was Destouches.

Powrie, 1990s, 205.

Powrie, 1980s, 1.

107–109.

Daly and Dowd, 108. The cost overruns ruined Carax’s reputation; he was unable to make another film for eight years.

Binoche had arrived, at this point, with triumphant performances in films such as André Téchiné’s Rendez-Vous (1985) and a prestige project such as Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), in addition to Carax’s two early films.

Asked by David Thompson about shooting his fictional narrative in a context of real homelessness, Carax says: “For me it’s an attempt to break down the frontier between what people call fiction and non-fiction, which doesn’t interest me. Real homeless people and actors, a false bridge and genuine fireworks, money and no money—I didn’t mix these things consciously.” 10. One suspects he would have said the same thing about shooting in a realistic style on the Montpellier set of the Pont-Neuf.

For a more detailed account of Carax’s relationship with Godard, see Daly and Dowd, a list of specific influences, 36–38; discussion of Carax’s role of Edgar in Godard’s King Lear (1987), 103–105. The critical and commercial failure of Lovers on the Bridge was such that it did not even find an U.S. distributer until 1999.

Alex’s stealing a red snapper in the market is presented with a similar visual realism, even with the fish’s tail sticking out of his shirt; observed by normal Parisians around him, it marks his difference and marginalization.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has made this point: “When a missing person poster for Michelle (Juliette Binoche) suddenly turns up all over Paris in Pont-Neuf—a poster so “unbelievably” widespread and endlessly reproduced that one is made to feel briefly that no other poster exists in the city—the outlandishness is poetically apt, because it corresponds to the paranoid sense of threat that Alex feels about the world impinging on his love, an overwhelming emotional reality that is no less valid than the more mundane physical reality an American director would be more likely to honor.”

Anderson, Melissa. “The Triumph of Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang.” The Village Voice, November 27, 2013.

Bazin, André. What is Cinema? Volume 1. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. Yale University Press, 1995.

Carax, Leos. Les amants du Pont-Neuf. Lovers on the Bridge, Kino Lorber DVD.

Daly, Fergus and Garin Dowd. Leos Carax. Manchester, UK, Manchester University Press, 2003.

Frodon, Jean-Michel. “Leos Carax: tous derrière et lui devant.” L’Âge Modern du Cinéma Français: De la Nouvelle Vague à nos Jours. Paris: Flammarion, 787–93, 1995.

Hayes, Graeme. “Representation, Masculinity, Nation: The Crises of Les Amants du Pont-Neuf.” In French Cinema in the 1990s. Ed., Phil Powrie. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Louise-Salom, Tessa. Mr. X: A Vision of Leos Carax (2014) The Artificial Eye. DVD.

Powrie, Phil. French Cinema in the 1980s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.

———, ed. French Cinema in the 1990s. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Thompson, David. “Leos Carax.” Sight and Sound. 5:2. September 10, 1992.

Robinson, David. Chaplin: His Life and Art. New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Company, 1985.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Leos Carax: The Problem with Poetry.” Film Comment. May–June, 12–18, 1994.

Vincendeau, Ginette. Stars and Stardom in French Cinema. New York: Continuum, 2000.

Title: Les amants du Pont-Neuf (1991) and City Lights (1931)
Author: William H. Mooney
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Adaptation and the New Art Film
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-62933-5

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-62934-2

Copyright Year: 2021
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62934-2_4