The Lovers on the Bridge

With this feverish saga of amour fou, Leos Carax pushed his ambitions to glorious new heights. Michèle (Juliette Binoche), an artist who is losing her sight, meets Alex (Denis Lavant), a homeless street performer, while sleeping rough on Paris’s centuries-old Pont-Neuf, beginning an obsessive affair that soon collides with crushing reality. The result of an infamously lengthy, arduous production, The Lovers on the Bridge is a bracing plunge into life on the city’s turbulent margins—a visually arresting, musically intoxicating film that is never more dazzling than when the lovers water-ski madly across the Seine amid a shower of fireworks.