It's an old story: a filmmaker is crowned king of all he beholds. As a follow-up to his calling card, he decides to call in all his chips--make an homage to the romantic opium of High Hollywood. But he's not going to make the usual pablum--he's going to tell the truth about the ugly world he lives in while arousing us silly with googly-eyed, sentimental movie tropes. Martin Scorsese followed up TAXI DRIVER with NEW YORK, NEW YORK, Coppola came back from APOCALYPSE NOW with ONE FROM THE HEART, and Jean-Jacques Beineix tried to top DIVA with THE MOON IN THE GUTTER. And in 1991, the then-wunderkind of French cinema, Leos Carax, bet it all on LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF.
These follies--a combination of studio sugar and bitter pill--never work. Carax's movie--many agonizing years in the making--doesn't either, but its head is screwed on a little more tightly than those other films'. His hero is a homeless, inarticulate boy; his heroine, a one-eyed painter losing her one good eye. He piles on bits of shtikum from movies he's too young for: a hobo who owns the keys to a museum, tramps poisoning the cups of coffee-sipping bourgeois to pick their pockets, an antique box stuffed with franc notes perched perilously close to the Seine. The alternation between this mothball-stinky hokum and grim, Frederick Wisemanish cinema verite depictions of the life of the homeless in Paris is meant to have a dazzling teeter-totter effect.
But the combination of Cassavetes and Vincente Minnelli in NEW YORK, NEW YORK was meant to wow too--and Scorsese is a better director than Carax. The movie's yin and yang, rather than balancing, cancel each other out. And you might feel guilty about noticing that the movie's big set piece--a romantic dance on the Pont-Neuf bridge as Quatorze Juillet fireworks burst--would have been nailed twenty times better by an American hack like Michael Bay. These folly-fantasias, always dubbed "delirious" in the press, are always oddly enervated. The gimcrackery of old-time moviemaking, once the suspension of disbelief is removed, makes for a dictionary definition of hollow form. And Carax isn't helped much by his actors, especially Juliette Binoche--who gropes at the anti-glamour of her role like a one-man band playing the Kentucky Waltz with seventeen spoons.
These follies--a combination of studio sugar and bitter pill--never work. Carax's movie--many agonizing years in the making--doesn't either, but its head is screwed on a little more tightly than those other films'. His hero is a homeless, inarticulate boy; his heroine, a one-eyed painter losing her one good eye. He piles on bits of shtikum from movies he's too young for: a hobo who owns the keys to a museum, tramps poisoning the cups of coffee-sipping bourgeois to pick their pockets, an antique box stuffed with franc notes perched perilously close to the Seine. The alternation between this mothball-stinky hokum and grim, Frederick Wisemanish cinema verite depictions of the life of the homeless in Paris is meant to have a dazzling teeter-totter effect.
But the combination of Cassavetes and Vincente Minnelli in NEW YORK, NEW YORK was meant to wow too--and Scorsese is a better director than Carax. The movie's yin and yang, rather than balancing, cancel each other out. And you might feel guilty about noticing that the movie's big set piece--a romantic dance on the Pont-Neuf bridge as Quatorze Juillet fireworks burst--would have been nailed twenty times better by an American hack like Michael Bay. These folly-fantasias, always dubbed "delirious" in the press, are always oddly enervated. The gimcrackery of old-time moviemaking, once the suspension of disbelief is removed, makes for a dictionary definition of hollow form. And Carax isn't helped much by his actors, especially Juliette Binoche--who gropes at the anti-glamour of her role like a one-man band playing the Kentucky Waltz with seventeen spoons.