1991 Leos Carax movie
Rating: 16/20
Plot: A fire-eating vagrant falls for a homeless artist who is going blind and gets to know her when she moves into the neighborhood--a bridge that is under construction.
"The people in your dreams--you should call them when you're awake. It would make life simpler."
I almost went with another quote, the almost-insulting "Try not to suffer that much" wisdom a character imparts to another in this. This one might have more to do with a central theme for this movie although I have to say that I really had trouble deciding what Leos Carax is saying about relationships, romance, love, homelessness, bridge restoration, art, or anything else in this movie. The ending is especially confusing to me. Without giving anything away, I can say that I did understand how Carax thought it was fair for the pair of characters to end up where they end up in this. It's almost a type of Hollywood ending that a certain kind of person would love at the end of a movie with something like romance at its center, but it doesn't quite feel deserved. If I could be convinced that this is the ending they deserve, I'd bump this up a few points.
When I wrote about movies I was anticipating, I put an upcoming Leos Carax musical on the list. That seemed a little absurd since I hadn't even seen another Carax movie other than Holy Motors. He's not incredibly prolific as Motors was his first in something like 13 years. This 1991 movie, his third, came 8 years before that, and it was a troubled production that went way over budget and seemingly derailed his career. He even had to have an entire bridge constructed after several problems pushed their filming schedule past the time they were allowed to shoot on the actual bridge.
Like Holy Motors, this is powered by a stunning Denis Lavant performance. He plays one character here instead of the 11 or so that he plays in Holy Motors although his vagrant is duplicitous in this one. He does demonstrate a versatility though as he performs gymnastics and eats fire. He's dynamic, this grimy passion just oozing from him. He's fervent when the scenes call for his character to unleash a little, but this is mostly a quiet performance where what is underneath is far more important than anything palpable. As with parts of Motors, a lot of what he does here relies on a physicality. I'm not sure how large Lavant is and am too lazy to look it up, but there are moments in this when he looks like the smallest person who's ever existed. He also might be the most fatigued, like trying to penetrate this impenetrable shield to connect with others and find happiness has taken everything out of him. When we first see him, he's shambling down the middle of a street, like a guy who learned how to move by watching montages of Charlie Chaplin's tramp character at his most desperate times. For most of the movie, he moves with this limp, and it almost makes you wonder if he'll forget how to walk normally again after all his scenes are shot. It's a really powerful performance as he manages to create a character you have empathy for while not agreeing with much of what he does.
Juliette Binoche's performance is also special. The first time we see her character is through a rear-view mirror, the same way we meet Lavant's character. She's ragged, filthy, and abused by circumstances we're not aware of, but there's still this tremendous beauty here. Carax, you failed to make Binoche undesirable here. Of course, she has to be beautiful so that Lavant's character could fall in love with her, unless he's just got a thing for women with one eye. I don't know when Lavant's character fell for her, but for me, it was a bathing scene, the kind of thing I haven't been able to stop thinking about since seeing this movie. There's a physicality to her performance as well, and the way that she can keep up with Lavant in this thing, like she needs to keep up with him in order for the whole thing to actually work, makes her equally great.
The scenes in this that really work are so good that they are impossible not to focus on, and even if I had issues with the narrative as a whole, the stuff that I'll remember for a long long time keep this in borderline great territory.
Early scenes on a bus transporting sick and injured homeless people and the aggressively disgusting hospital they're taken to are almost shocking in their realism. In fact, I think I was fooled into thinking it was guerrilla-style filming, that Lavant was just thrown in with all these real people.
There's a scene where the cello score becomes diegetic that floored me.
I love this shared drunken laughter before a scene involving fireworks. It sounded like a lost Yoko Ono track.
Right after that, there's a dance sequence that is as chaotic and beautiful as anything you're likely to see in a romantic movie. Both characters flail in front of a backdrop of impossible fireworks, guided by these improbable soundtrack shifts. It's wonderful, and following that, there's waterskiing.
Props to Louisiana the cat.
There's a great scene where they're wandering the streets of Paris--but not the type of streets we usually get to see in a romantic movie that takes place in Paris, of course--and they stumble upon a discotheque. She lies on her side to watch dancing, strobe-lit feet. The camera angle reverses to show her face behind the strobe-lit feet, and you see his feet behind her facing the opposite direction. It's one of so many moments in this where Carax tells his story visually.
Oh, man! That sleeping guy montage with the calliope music! A silhouetted boner during this beach run tracking shot. A candlelit viewing of a Rembrandt painting. Lavant's solving of a problem with fire, one of many times where Carax is daring us to actually root for this character.
Last but not least, I want to mention a third character, Hans, played by Klaus-Michael Gruber. There's a moment--on the bridge, of course, since that's where most of this takes place--where he shares his story with Binoche's character after a first half of story where he's been disgruntled and harsh, treating her arrival on the bridge as a personal affront. His eyes as he's sharing his story nearly brought tears. If you're going to only appear in one movie, I guess you'd want to make it a performance like this one.
I wonder if there's something political represented by this couple's relationship. I'm not sure what that message would be either, but the characters' self-destructive decisions that end up bringing down others might represent something else. Their story takes place during a bicentennial (or bisesquicentennial?) celebration. There might be something there, but I don't have any background on the political climate in France in the early-90's and will have to settle on enjoying this as a superficial love story.
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