The bridges at the River

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Movie
German title The bridges at the River
Original title The Bridges of Madison County
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1995
length 135 minutes
Age rating FSK 12
Rod
Director Clint Eastwood
script Richard LaGravenese
production Clint Eastwood,
Kathleen Kennedy
music Lennie Niehaus
camera Jack N. Green
cut Joel Cox
occupation
synchronization

The bridges on the river (Original title: The Bridges of Madison County ) is a film drama from 1995 . The director, producer and male lead is Clint Eastwood , the female lead is played by Meryl Streep . The film is based on the novel of the same name by Robert James Waller from 1992.

action

Mid-1990s: After Francesca Johnson's death, her two adult children, Michael and Carolyn, organize their estate. Her mother ordered in her will to have her cremated and her ashes scattered from Roseman Bridge . The children wonder about this and, during their research, come across previously unknown photos of their mother from 1965. From one of their letters they learn that their mother was having an affair with a photographer who died in 1982 and who also decreed that his was his To scatter ashes from Roseman Bridge . The children are initially outraged, but then read their mother's three diaries and find out what happened back then.

Originally from Italy, Francesca Johnson is in her mid-forties in 1965 and her family lives on a farm in Winterset , Iowa . When her husband Richard and their two children go to an agricultural show in Illinois for four days , Francesca is left alone. She is doing her day-to-day work when a driver comes by to ask for directions. The stranger is Robert Kincaid, a Bellingham photographer assigned to photograph Madison County's covered bridges for National Geographic . After a vain attempt to explain the way in words, Francesca unceremoniously accompanies the stranger to the Roseman Bridge he is looking for . On the way there, they start talking. Francesca is skeptical and at the same time fascinated by Robert's relaxed and cosmopolitan manner. Back home, she asks him to come into the house for an iced tea. After all, he even stays for dinner.

Francesca feels more and more drawn to Robert. Through him she rediscovered her own longings, believed to be lost, for which there is no longer any place in her everyday life. Despite protests to the contrary, she is not happy with her life. When she came to America with her husband, who was stationed in Italy at the time, after the Second World War , she had imagined life there to be different, especially since she also had to give up her position as a teacher for her husband, as he did not want her to work. Little by little she learns more about Robert's life. He is independent, travels the world a lot and has already been to her Italian hometown of Bari for a few days . Francesca is enthusiastic, but at the same time feels inferiority complexes in view of her own simple housewife existence. After a little dissatisfaction arises because of their different life plans, Kincaid leaves again. Francesca regrets evicting him and posts a note on Roseman Bridge that Kincaid plans to photograph the following morning.

Roseman Bridge in Madison County, one of the filming locations (2001)

The next day Robert finds the news and arranges to meet her on the bridge in the early evening. While Francesca is buying a new dress in nearby Des Moines , Kincaid happens to witness hostility from locals towards a woman named Lucy Redfield, who is believed to have had an affair with another man. Robert fears that he will get Francesca into similar trouble and offers her to cancel the meeting, but Francesca will not be dissuaded. In the evening the two get closer physically and spend the night together.

In the next two days they use the remaining time for joint excursions in the area. Then Francesca imagines that for Kincaid she is just one of many affairs around the world; she accuses him of being a loner with fear of attachment. But Robert is serious about their relationship and asks her to come with him. Although Francesca loves Robert, her consideration for her faithful husband and the teenage children forbids her to give up her previous life. She also suspects that leaving her family would weigh heavily on a possible future with Kincaid. She therefore asks Kincaid to leave it at the four extraordinary days and keep the memory of them.

A few days later she is in town with her husband, who has since returned, and sees Robert from a distance for the last time just before he leaves. She is about to get out of the car and run to him, but hesitates - and Robert drives on. She later decides to contact Lucy Redfield, whom everyone has avoided and with whom she will later become deeply friends. It was only fourteen years later, after the death of her husband, that Francesca tried to get in touch with Robert again, but was unable to find him. After three more years, she receives mail from Kincaid's attorney and learns that Robert has passed away and left her with all of his belongings.

By reading the diaries, the children can understand their mother better and reflect on their own marital problems. Together with Lucy Redfield, they comply with Francesca's request to scatter her ashes in the river below the Roseman Bridge .

background

Pre-production and casting

Amblin Entertainment , the production company of Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy , bought the film rights to Robert James Waller's novel in late 1991, even before it was published. The sum was a relatively modest 25,000 US dollars, because at that time it was not foreseeable that the novel would become a globally successful bestseller. The preparations for the film turned out to be tedious, several directors and scriptwriters got on and off the project. Spielberg considered taking over the directing himself for a time, but was strained by his major project Schindler's List , which is why he again refrained from these plans. Then Sydney Pollack was hired to direct, who wanted to cast Robert Redford in the male lead. However, Pollack resigned from directing a little later.

After Pollack's departure, the Australian Bruce Beresford , known primarily for Miss Daisy and her chauffeur, was hired as a director in 1992 . He wanted to cast a European actress for the role of Francesca and was thinking of Catherine Deneuve , Lena Olin , Sônia Braga and Isabella Rossellini , while the producing studio Warner Brothers - probably for commercial reasons - tended to use American actresses like Meryl Streep and Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange favored. In addition, there were disagreements with Steven Spielberg, because Beresford wanted Richard LaGravenese to revise the script, which many participants thought was a success . In August 1994, less than a month before the scheduled start of shooting, Beresford threw in the towel and production threatened to fail - especially since the female lead had not yet been taken.

Clint Eastwood in 1994

Clint Eastwood , who had been playing the male lead since 1992, was visibly annoyed by the problems. Terry Semel , the executive producer at Warner, offered Eastwood to direct. After a short period of reflection, Eastwood finally joined the film project as director and co-producer. Eastwood had previously directed a total of 17 films since 1971 and had a great success with the Western Merciless in 1992 , but his previous films have belonged to the western, action or crime genre. In this respect, the love drama The Bridges on the River offered him a new challenge.

In addition to the candidates already mentioned, Warner Brothers considered taking a much younger actress than 45-year-old Streep. For Clint Eastwood, Streep was the preferred candidate, on the one hand because his mother had read the book and gave him Streep as her preferred cast, on the other hand because the 64-year-old did not want too great an age gap between him and his film partner. Meryl Streep was initially critical of the film project because she felt the novel was a "crime against literature", and only after reading the script did she change her mind. Streep finally got a four million US dollar fee and a percentage of the film's revenue in the project. In the English original, Meryl Streep speaks her role with a slight Italian accent, but this was not used in the German dubbed version.

Adaptation and script

The novel by Robert James Waller sold millions of copies and was on bestseller lists for several years, but was also torn apart by many critics as a " New Age bulge" or as "painfully and ostentatiously sensitive". Richard LaGravenese tried to eliminate the criticized weaknesses of the novel with his script, but at the same time to preserve the romantic attitude of the material. Similar to the question of the director and the leading actress, the development of the script was also characterized by problems. Before LaGravenese, Kurt Luedtke and then Ronald Bass were commissioned to draft a script, but they did not deliver any satisfactory results.

Compared to the novel, LaGravenese's script shifts more to the perspective of Francesca, while at the same time it makes the character of Robert Kincaid less pretentious and more down-to-earth: For example, in the book, after Robert's death, Francesca is sent his poetic essay called Falling from Dimension Z , in the Instead, she gets a picture book called Four Days , which contains the bridges of Madison County. The scene in which Robert and Francesca see each other for the last time is clearly different in the book: Robert is not aware in the book that Francesca is seeing him. The character of Lucy, who has been cast out by the village community, has been added to the film so that Robert is aware of the consequences that the affair can have for Francesca. Many dialogues were rewritten or changed compared to the novel. LaGravenese took David Lean's classic film encounter , which deals with a brief and intense relationship between two married people, as a trend-setting role model. Similar to encounter , falling in love slowly builds up through small details and gestures, mutual conversations and increasing familiarity.

When Eastwood took over the direction, he urged LaGravenese not to stray too far from the popular template with his script and to include some of the book's memorable key phrases in the script. Eastwood's goal was to get numerous readers of the novel to be satisfied with the adaptation . At the same time, Eastwood tried to get away from the idealized romance in the book and make it more realistic, for example by incorporating a few upsets and arguments between the lovers.

Filming

Filming took place in various locations in Iowa from September 15, 1994 through October 31, 1994. Eastwood shot the scenes of him and Streep in strict chronological order, which made it easier for the two actors to transfer emotions from one scene to the other. After the shooting with Streep, which lasted around four weeks, the scenes with Francesca's children were filmed. As with many of his films, Eastwood, an auteur in the Hollywood business, was a fast-paced director who relied on spontaneous ideas and precise preparation on set rather than repeating all the scenes over and over. For example, he included the scene in which, as Robert, he accidentally almost drops a beer in Francesca's unfamiliar kitchen, in the finished film. With Eastwood's working methods, the film was finished a few days before the planned closing time and the production costs amounted to around 22 million US dollars, which was already below average for a star-studded Hollywood film.

The new Ceda Bridge in Madison County (2016)

Right before he'd agreed to direct, Eastwood drove around Iowa, looking for interesting locations. Among other things, he stopped the plan to recreate the Roseman Bridge for the film and instead shot the real Roseman Bridge - that saved a total of around $ 1.5 million. A rundown and already animal-populated farmhouse that had been vacant for around 20 years has been restored and made the home of the Johnson family in the film. One of the bridges, the Cedar Bridge , built in 1883 , was destroyed by arson on September 3, 2002. As a result, a replica of the bridge was built, which was inaugurated on October 9, 2004.

Clint Eastwood's colleague Bruce Ricker took over the music advice for the song selection , while Lennie Niehaus acted as the composer of the film music . Songs by Johnny Hartman , Dinah Washington , Irene Kral , Barbara Lewis and two versions of the instrumental composition Doe Eyes , which Eastwood wrote himself and was arranged by Lennie Niehaus, were used. In a scene in the jazz club you can briefly see a jazz musician on the double bass, Clint Eastwood's son Kyle Eastwood .

synchronization

The German dubbed version was created for the cinema premiere in 1995 at FFS Film- & Fernseh-Synchron in Munich. Hartmut Neugebauer wrote the dialogue book and took over the dubbing, he also lent the voice to Jim Haynie as Francesca's husband Michael.

role actor German dubbing voice
Robert Kincaid Clint Eastwood Klaus Kindler
Francesca Johnson Meryl Streep Dagmar Dempe
Carolyn Johnson Annie Corley Gudrun Vaupel
Michael Johnson Victor Slezak Pierre Peters-Arnolds
Richard Johnson Jim Haynie Hartmut Neugebauer
Mr. Peterson, administrator of the will Richard location Alexander Allerson

reception

Cinema release and finances

It opened in theaters in the USA on June 2, 1995, and in Germany on September 28, 1995. The film grossed around US $ 182 million in cinemas around the world, including around US $ 71 million in the United States, making it a huge commercial success.

Reviews

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
critic
audience
Metacritic
critic
audience
IMDb

Richard Corliss from Time magazine called Eastwood one of the "most reserved directors - where the book gaws, the film discreetly observes (...)". The script deals with mature topics and deals with “the expectation and consequences of love - the slow dance of appraisal, waiting for an erotic movement to begin that is not rejected, talking about what to do when the erotic heat increases ripens into a love light ”. The film negotiates what the effects of the affair are on the wife, who has been loyal to her husband until then, and on the rootless man who realizes that he needs a woman, but cannot keep her permanently. Corliss saw the film as a “gift” from Eastwood, known for his many relationships with women, “to women”: “To Francesca, to all the women he has once loved - and to Streep, the literary sweetness in an intelligent passion in film alchemized . "

On the occasion of the German cinema premiere in Der Spiegel , Susanne Weingarten wrote that “for a long time there was only room for men” in Eastwood's world and that he had only directed films for “classic men's genres”. That is why The Bridges on the River , "a romance that is as inconspicuous as it is inconspicuous at first glance, is actually the greatest challenge he has ever faced in his career." Eastwood breaks with the "dream of the invulnerable Tough Guy". It is “Francesca's story. And Eastwood is the size to let them play. " The bridges on the river are an" old-fashioned chamber play, a film that wants nothing more than to tell a simple story of two people. Because the world of people, Clint Eastwood realized at some point, is much more exciting than the world of myths. True heroes die old. ”In addition to Eastwood, Weingarten also highlighted the screenplay by Richard LaGravenese and the“ sensual ”acting by Meryl Streep. She played so "oblivious to herself, as if she knew exactly that this film is hers."

The Catholic film service , however, was only satisfied to a limited extent: “The ostensibly sentimental story was staged with subtle, often cool intimacy, but without being able to escape the psychological one-dimensionality of the successful novel.” It was a “conflicting film”, the “ethical issues “Let it sound indirectly.

Awards

At the 1996 Academy Awards , Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress . To award the Golden Globe Awards in 1996 Meryl Streep were as Best Actress - Drama nomination, and the film in the category Best Picture - Drama . At the 1996 Screen Actors Guild Awards ceremony , Meryl Streep also received a nomination for Best Actress .

Clint Eastwood won an ASCAP Award in 1996 in the Top Box Office Films category . The American Society of Cinematographers nominated cinematographer Jack N. Green for an ASC Award in 1996 for outstanding achievements in cinematography on a feature film released in theaters. At the 1996 BMI Film & TV Awards , Lennie Niehaus won a prize for film music. For a César in 1996, The Bridges on the River was nominated for Best Foreign Film .

The legendary French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma voted The Bridges on the River 1999 together with Brian De Palmas Carlito’s Way (1993) and Hou Hsiao-Hsiens Goodbye South, Goodbye (1996) as the best film of the 1990s. The American Film Institute put the film at number 90 on their list of Best American Romance Movies of All Time in 2002.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hilary Radner: The New Woman's Film: Femme-centric Movies for Smart Chicks . Taylor & Francis, 2017, ISBN 978-1-317-28648-6 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  2. ^ Marc Eliot: American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood . Crown, 2009, ISBN 978-0-307-46249-7 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  3. ↑ 'The Bridges of Madison County' hits a roadblock. Retrieved June 8, 2020 .
  4. ↑ 'The Bridges of Madison County' hits a roadblock. Retrieved June 8, 2020 .
  5. ^ The making of The Bridges of Madison County . Retrieved June 8, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Susanne Weingarten: Macho on withdrawal . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1995, pp. 259-260 ( online ).
  7. ^ Hilary Radner: The New Woman's Film: Femme-centric Movies for Smart Chicks . Taylor & Francis, 2017, ISBN 978-1-317-28648-6 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  8. ^ Marc Eliot: American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood . Crown, 2009, ISBN 978-0-307-46249-7 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  9. ↑ Jim Welsh: Fixing the Bridges of Madison County . In: Literature / Film Quarterly . tape 23 , no. 3 . Salisbury 1995.
  10. ^ Marc Eliot: American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood . Crown, 2009, ISBN 978-0-307-46249-7 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  11. ↑ Susanne Weingarten: Macho on withdrawal . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1995, pp. 259-260 ( online ).
  12. ↑ Jim Welsh: Fixing the Bridges of Madison County . In: Literature / Film Quarterly . tape 23 , no. 3 . Salisbury 1995.
  13. ↑ Jim Welsh: Fixing the Bridges of Madison County . In: Literature / Film Quarterly . tape 23 , no. 3 . Salisbury 1995.
  14. ^ Hilary Radner: The New Woman's Film: Femme-centric Movies for Smart Chicks . Taylor & Francis, 2017, ISBN 978-1-317-28648-6 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  15. ↑ Jim Welsh: Fixing the Bridges of Madison County . In: Literature / Film Quarterly . tape 23 , no. 3 . Salisbury 1995.
  16. ↑ Documentary: An Old Fashioned Love Story: Making 'The Bridges of Madison County' (2008), minute 4
  17. ↑ Documentary: An Old Fashioned Love Story: Making 'The Bridges of Madison County' (2008), minute 4
  18. ^ Hilary Radner: The New Woman's Film: Femme-centric Movies for Smart Chicks . Taylor & Francis, 2017, ISBN 978-1-317-28648-6 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  19. ↑ Documentary: An Old Fashioned Love Story: Making 'The Bridges of Madison County' (2008), minute 8
  20. ↑ Documentary: An Old Fashioned Love Story: Making 'The Bridges of Madison County' (2008), minutes 11–12
  21. ^ Hilary Radner: The New Woman's Film: Femme-centric Movies for Smart Chicks . Taylor & Francis, 2017, ISBN 978-1-317-28648-6 ( google.de [accessed June 8, 2020]).
  22. ^ The making of The Bridges of Madison County . Retrieved June 8, 2020 .
  23. ↑ Documentary: An Old Fashioned Love Story: Making 'The Bridges of Madison County' (2008), minute 14
  24. ↑ The bridge on the river burned down
  25. ↑ http://www.cedarcoveredbridge.com/
  26. ↑ Biographical Notes on Bruce Ricker at Pasoroble Film Festival
  27. ^ Doe Eyes - Clint Eastwood, Lennie Niehaus | Song Info | AllMusic. Retrieved June 8, 2020 (American English).
  28. ↑ Kyle Eastwood at Aveleyman. Retrieved June 8, 2020 .
  29. ↑ German synchronous index | Movies | The bridges at the River. Retrieved June 8, 2020 .
  30. ↑ Financial data on imdb
  31. ↑ Financial data on boxofficemojo
  32. ↑ Sarah Ahern, Sarah Ahern: 'Bridges of Madison County' Author Robert James Waller Dies at 77. In: Variety. March 10, 2017, accessed June 8, 2020 .
  33. ↑ a b The bridges on the river at Rotten Tomatoes , accessed on May 27, 2015
  34. ↑ a b The bridges on the river at Metacritic , accessed on May 27, 2015
  35. ↑ The bridges on the river in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  36. ↑ Richard Corliss: WHEN EROTIC HEAT TURNS INTO LOVE LIGHT . In: Time . June 5, 1995, ISSN  0040-781X ( time.com [accessed June 9, 2020]).
  37. ↑ Susanne Weingarten: Macho on withdrawal . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1995, pp. 259-260 ( online ).
  38. ↑ The bridges on the river during the film service. Retrieved June 9, 2020 .
  39. ↑ David D: Toronto Film Review: Cahiers du Cinéma - Best of 90s and 00s. In: Toronto Film Review. June 2, 2014, accessed June 8, 2020 .