This move teaches us "Love doesn't need any money". This couple was living a life honest to themselves. The expression of uneasy feelings is one of the kind. After he gets out of jail, they are shinning in the night sky of Paris. The fireworks scene and music selection, everything was artistic. Congratulation! I gave it 8 stars. This movie became one of my favorite French movies.

Reading up about the Cinéma du Look movement,I found out that along with Luc Besson and Jean-Jacques Beineix there was a third director,whose name I had not previously connected to Look.

Taking a look at Leos Carax's credits,I discovered that one of Carax's titles was the most expensive French film ever made! (at the time) Which led to me getting ready to join the lovers on the bridge.

View on the film:

Handling the biggest budget for a an offering from the movement,writer/director Leos Carax & cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier conjure up moments of pure Cinéma du Look magic blazing the sky and water in pulp colours as ultra-stylised tracking shots fully display the remarkable set.Focusing on the "alienated youth" of Cinéma du Look.

Carax gives the tittle brittle edges which open up youth hostels and also whips up the frenzied romance between Michèle and Alex in decadent whip-pans and razor sharp editing giving the movie an excellent,raw animated atmosphere.

Spending most of the film on the bridge,the screenplay by Carax casts a vast odyssey over Alex and Michèle relationship-a relationship which Carax subtly designs to complement each of their flaws,from Michèle gaining full sight at herself and the paintings,to Alex finding an inability to compromise his stay on the bridge.

Spanning a period of over 3 years,Carax captures the psychological power play between Michèle (played by a stunningly tough edged Juliette Binoche) and Alex, (played with a real Punk attitude by Denis Lavant)but struggles to build a sense on the passage of time giving a depth to the relationship, due to Caraz threading the romance in an uneven, disjointed manner,as the lovers meet on the Cinéma du Look bridge.

There are moments and scenes in Lovers on the Bridge that waver between being straightforward in their realism and the given grittiness of living life on the streets homeless and of those sudden romantic bursts that are also a given if you're French and wanting to show how wonderful and horrible it can be in a strange situation. There are many I could point to, but there's also a suddenness to the work, moments that pop out and make the viewer put into perspective the tragic nature of this story and the characters. There's an unpredictability, but not without logic or something in line with life in this situation and place.

One such moment that few reviewers may talk about involves the character of Hans and his death. Throughout the film he's been more than wary of the presence of half-blind Michelle (Binoche) who has also fallen in (possible) love with Alex (Lavant) the drunken/druggie fire-breather, and for a while we as the audience see him as a rather ugly being. But then he opens up to Michelle- how he came to be on this bridge without a job, or without his wife and the death of his child- and he offers her to take her to a museum, which he has a key for from his job as a guard, to see a painting as close to the surface as possible late at night. He's actually quite a touching character gradually, still grumpy and grisly but with a conscience and feeling for Michelle's plight... Then as he walks down a set of stairs and comes to the side of the riverbank he slips and falls and dies.

In any other hands this could become high melodrama, a director pulling out all the stops to make this a really significant event for these character Michelle and Alex. But just as soon as he was there, he's gone, and I was overwhelmed for a moment by pure anguish at this man's demise. There's other moments like that as well in Carax's film, where he substitutes stark poetry- or something truly alive and fast and ebullient poetry with his camera and wonderful, expensive set (some of the time)- and balances so satisfyingly between the grime and clutter of this little enclave on the bridge and the torrid love between two people who are together for various reasons, some known well and some intimated by just the slightest moves (or lack thereof). With some minor exceptions like the very end, which leads to some curious and surreal ambiguity, it's a sensational ride.

We're taken along on the story of Alex, a fire-breather as his only trade and with hobbies of booze and drugs in order to sleep, and Michelle, a painter who has nowhere to go except to old lovers she'd rather not see, or can't see because of flailing eyesight (or, if she does, bad things happen- or appear to happen, again the ambiguity). They become very close, maybe too close for the extremely lonely and possibly brain damaged Alex, and pull off a money making scheme, which ends with a moment of a selfish act, as well as have nights of debauchery and excitement. The most notable of the latter, probably of the best kinds of exuberant, crazy type scenes in any motion picture, is when Alex and Michelle, smashed to hell, run and jump and dance to a giant fireworks display, with Carax pumping up Iggy Pop and Blue Danube Waltz music, and finishing off with a water-skiing down the river. This is one of those sequences I probably will never forget, not just for the power of the film-making but for the feeling one has for the characters at that moment of time in the movie: sublime, momentary escapism.

Things end up getting very dark for the characters, not least of which for Alex who goes on a rampage tearing down posters looking for Michelle for an eye-operation (this is one of those scenes that goes between reality and fantasy that's jarring: it verges on pretension, but I actually didn't mind it for how wrapped up one becomes in the plight of Alex with "his" Michelle), and the ending finds the two years later, changed only on the surface. All the old wounds are there, and how they'll exactly end up is difficult to say. But what is clear for Carax, after going through a story that features real homeless people in shelters (this footage shot like a documentary, plunging us so far into this world we forget most of the time the bridge is a set), of numerous fights and cries and hugs and laughs and fights between the two would-be/may-be lovebirds, that what would be cynical in any other hands is treated as bittersweet humanism. Carax cares for these characters deeply, even the troubled Alex, and it's important to understand that in their downfall. A+