The Girl on the Bridge
Patrice Leconte, France, 1998, 92 mins
Review by Gerald Houghton (2000)
That Patrice Leconte's gossamer-thin picture survives both the trappings of male-menopausal wishfulfilment and sizing-up a bit like one of those men's mag 'fragrance' ads, is, I suspect, both testament to the skill of his able leads and his own particular way with, well, gossamer-thin texts. Think Le Parfum d'Yvonne; wistful romance every bit as delicate as perfume in a wind-tunnel. Or his piece de resistance, the heady, intoxicating Hairdresser's Husband, suffused as it is with Nyman's gloriously lush, string-laden fatalism. It's not always your cloth, Leconte's back catalogue suggests, but the way you cut it.
French cinema's most reliable leading man, Daniel Auteuil, is Gbor, a sort one-man Samaritan hit-squad, prowling Parisian bridges in the search for lost and inconsolable souls. But altruism masks intent when we, like the parapet-hugging Adèle (Vanessa Paradis), cotton on that this is how he finds willing partners for a knife throwing act.
The pair hit the road, him handling the blades, she anything in trousers. There’s bickering and falling out, but theirs is a success built, literally, on partnership and they cannot be parted for long.
This is brittle stuff which ever way you turn it. It's fable more than storytelling, nominally located in the real world but fantastically set adrift by the non-incursion of real life. 'I'm [her] good fairy', Gabor tells a young man on a train. When he and Adèle are saved from drowning, they are housed in a hospital ward that caters for nothing but jumpers. Telepathic communication between the two emerges unremarked - or at least less remarked than the incredible gambling luck that dogs their every step. (Need a car? Win a raffle!) The whole is further dislocated by Jean Marie Dreujou's lush widescreen black and white photography and the freaks (the sexually lithe contortionist is particularly alarming) who share the bill. It has the occasional feeling of a less irritating Fellini or more restrained Blier.
Knife-tossing as surrogate penetration is a fragile metaphor at the best of times, though, and it's here given more than a run for its money by Serge Frydman's screenplay. But the (for now at least) purely platonic interplay between the ageing showman and his nubile target - father/daughter; older man/younger woman - mercifully never leaves you feeling queasy. (I can see the remake now: Harrison Ford flinging the contents of the cutlery drawer at a suitably pinioned Ms Juliette Lewis.) Besides, Auteuil and Paradis are wonderful.
It's a modest French trifle, then, that also rather puts one in mind of Leos Carax's over-inflated, wallet-worrier Les Amant du Pont Neuf. Leconte's film, though, is an altogether less tart affair in its obvious flimsy fairytale trappings; gorgeous to look at but not quite empty-headed. A trifle then, but with one hell of a big cherry right on the top.