The lovers of Pont-Neuf
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | The lovers of Pont-Neuf |
| Original title | Les Amants du Pont-Neuf |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1991 |
| length | 125 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Leos Carax |
| script | Leos Carax |
| production | Christian Fechner |
| camera | Jean-Yves Escoffier |
| cut | Nelly Quettier |
| occupation | |
| |
The Lovers of Pont-Neuf (original title: Les Amants du Pont-Neuf ) is a feature film by the French director Leos Carax from 1991. The drama, for which Carax also wrote the screenplay, tells of a young Clochard (played by Denis Lavant ) who lives on a Paris bridge, the Pont Neuf . There he falls in love with a blind painter ( Juliette Binoche ) who has fled her bourgeois world into homelessness .
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The young clochard and fire-eater Alex staggers through the nightly Paris, where he collapses on the street. His foot is run over by a speeding car. A short time later he was loaded unconscious on a public welfare bus and taken to the asylum in Nanterre . After his injury has been taken care of, the locked Alex returns to the Pont Neuf with a leg in plaster cast. He lives with Hans on the bridge, which is closed for renovation work. The elderly homeless man who followed his late wife into the street regularly provides Alex with hypnotics because he suffers from insomnia .
Alex also meets Michèle on the Pont Neuf. The slowly blind painter with an eye patch had observed his car accident and painted his face from memory. When she wants to make a graphic portrait of Alex in exchange for the picture, she faints. Alex takes care of Michèle and stands up for her with Hans, who wants to chase the girl away. Alex finds out that Michèle has voluntarily given up her bourgeois existence and was unhappy in love with the cellist Julien. Michèle fantasizes about his murder with her father's weapon that she has with her.
On the day of the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution , Alex and Michèle get drunk and have fun, including stealing a motorboat and water skiing on the Seine . As a result, both of them explore Paris at night together and get closer to each other. Michèle steals some sleeping pill ampoules from Hans' supply and promises to teach Alex to sleep. Both use the agent on passers-by in order to steal from them. With the money they have stolen, Alex and Michèle travel to the sea, where they get intimate for the first time. Michèle's attempt to cure Alex's insomnia with the help of pills, however, fails.
When they return to the bridge, Michele's eye disease begins to worsen. Hans, formerly the chief night watchman at the Louvre in Paris , grants her a glimpse of a beloved self-portrait of Rembrandt , which she can no longer see during the day due to an installed neon tube. However, she fends off his advances, whereupon he looks in vain for death in the Seine a little later. Alex reacts to Michèle's nocturnal stay with physical violence - against both himself and his girlfriend. But both get along again and Michèle begins to accept that she will soon go blind with Alex at her side.
When Michèle is searched for in the Métro for a poster campaign because it is possible to save her eyesight with a new type of operation, Alex sets the posters on fire. A poster sticker is killed. Michèle learns about the chance of a cure from the radio. She secretly administers sleeping pills to Alex and leaves him with the message carved into the bridge wall, “I didn't really love you. Forget me!"
Left alone, Alex shoots himself in the hand with Michèle's pistol. Later he was picked up by the police on the bridge and sentenced to three years imprisonment for negligent homicide on the poster. Two years later, Michèle, who had been healed of her eye disease, visits him in prison because she cannot forget Alex. She has returned to her middle-class life and lives with an ophthalmologist.
After Alex's release from prison, the two of them meet on a winter night at the renovated Pont Neuf, which has been reopened to traffic. There they celebrate their reunion and Michèle completes Alex's portrait. When she wants to leave Alex hours later and has to "go home", Alex does not want to let her go and rushes with her from the bridge into the Seine. Alex and Michèle emerge from the water and are taken in by an old couple of boatmen who are on their last trip to Le Havre with their barge . Alex and Michèle decide to accompany them and celebrate their love on the bow of the ship.
Reviews
The lexicon of international films judged that the film "developed a" serious game "about love, passion, physical and mental destruction" in sprawling image ideas and compositions [...] . It is about "a fascinating arc of images full of impulsiveness, oscillating between naturalistic description and fairytale exaggeration" .
Awards
Leading actress Juliette Binoche and production designer Michel Vandestien were nominated for the French César in 1992 . In the same year, Die Liebenden von Pont-Neuf received five nominations for the European Film Awards ( best film , best actor , best actress , camera and editor ) - Juliette Binoche, cameraman Jean-Yves Escoffier and film editor Nelly Quettier were recognized.
In 1993, Carax's directorial work was nominated for the British BAFTA Award for Best Non-English Language Film, but it fell short of Zhang Yimou's Chinese drama Red Lantern . A year later, Juliette Binoche won the Spanish film prize Sant Jordi for best foreign actress for her roles in The Lovers of Pont-Neuf , Doom (1992) and Three Colors: Blue (1993) .
After the film had only found a distributor in the USA in 1999, the Chicago Film Critics Association nominated it in the category Best Foreign Language Film in 2000 , but awarded the award to the eventual Oscar winner Everything About My Mother from Spain.
Web links
- The Lovers on the Bridge in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- The Lovers on the Bridge at Rotten Tomatoes (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ The lovers of Pont-Neuf. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .