Avis des critiques

On one level, it's a novelistic chronicle of bittersweet love in the vein of Jean Vigo's romantic/anarchic L'Atalante (1934) and Jean Cocteau's excursions into modern mythology. On another level, it has powerful documentary elements, most notably in the unsparingly clinical homeless-shelter sequence and in the visionary scene when Hans spirits Michèle into the Louvre for a clandestine look at her favorite painting (a Rembrandt self-portrait) before her eyesight vanishes for good.

Carax has never not delighted in highlighting Lavant's acrobatic skillset, but he's never regarded his muse as thoughtfully as he does in The Lovers on the Bridge. In the scene of Alex's fire-breathing busk routine, the camera bobs and weaves along with Lavant's slinking movements, curving down with the leg that the actor slinks out as he falls into a catlike pose. Lavant is transfixing even when just walking, stumbling about with a newborn-like jerkiness that marks Alex as a Lost Boy.

Though [Binoche's character is] haunted by a past break-up and her failing vision and he is consumed by suspicious jealousy, director Leos Carax sets the film ablaze with a taste for reckless, fevered extravagance, enlisting the city's Bicentennial fireworks as a backdrop and igniting all the ecstatic charm of this capital of love and cinema.

When Lovers hit French theaters back in 1991, the main focus was on how much its investors stood to lose. Now, nearly a quarter-century after its debut, what stands out are the film's expressive power, elemental imagery, and bona fide poetry. It lives up to its influences while creating something unique and genuinely moving.

Like Philippe Garrel, Carax is a marvellous director of the ‘birth of love', and just as haunted by the shadow of its death or disappearance.

In Les Amants du Pont Neuf Leos Carax provides the artistic response to Céline's indictments, all while drawing upon the writer's own ‘little invention.' Sharing Céline's mischievous disdain for conservatism of style and boredom with the sentimental, as well as his contempt for the phony, Leos Carax draws inspiration from the low artistic forms to create his own true ‘emotive account'...

Decorating his plaything [the Pont-Neuf set] with everything from fireworks to snow, Carax mounts a moving love story that fully earns its homage to L’Atalante in the closing sequence.