homelessness

The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

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What could be more thrillingly romantic than young, destitute artists falling in love while starving and drinking themselves to death on the streets of Paris? Try those young lovers beating up cops and lifting businessmen’s wallets together against a backdrop of fireworks & gunfire. Leos Carax’s 1991 stunner The Lovers on the Bridge depicts the kind of ferocious, burn-it-all-down love affair that scares everyone outside the mutually destructive pair at the center, whose romantic gestures include acts of betrayal, theft, murder, and institutionalization. It approaches Parisian homelessness with the same unsentimental, semi-documentary eye as Varda’s Vagabond, and yet it largely plays as a love letter to impulsive, erratic behavior instead of a dire warning against it. It’s a love story rotting in illness, addiction, and retributive violence, which greatly helps undercut the schmaltz when it frames the Eiffel Tower through the rotating spokes of a Ferris wheel. Countless movies gesture towards the all-consuming, obsessive passion of young love without ever fully capturing it; The Lovers on the Bridge is the real deal.

The English translation of the original French title is a deliberate simplification. The French title Les Amants du Pont-Neuf makes reference to a specific bridge, the oldest bridge in Paris (despite the name “Pont Neuf” paradoxically translating to “New Bridge”). It’s a historic site that has been cited as the location where the first human figure was ever captured in a photograph, an early daguerreotype experiment by the eponymous Louis Daguerre. It was also temporarily closed to the public for restoration from 1989 to 1991, when the film was set & produced. Juliette Binoche & Denis Lavant play young homeless artists who squat on that closed historic bridge, unsure how much they can trust one another despite their obvious mutual obsession. Our two lovers first encounter each other while their partner is unconscious. Binoche finds Lavant’s unresponsive, blackout drunk body in the street and sketches his corpse-like visage from memory. Once recovered, Lavant later finds Binoche sleeping in his personal alcove on the bridge, discovering the charcoal sketches of his own undead face and studying her with the same intense fascination in return. Once both awake, they start guzzling gallons of trash wine together and committing escalating crimes in the streets on either side of the Pont Neuf, coinciding with the citywide bicentennial celebration of The French Revolution. A painter and a street-performing firebreather, respectively, the homeless couple become unlikely, reckless avatars for the city’s long history of art, sex, violence, and sensual romance, breathing new life into Parisian clichés that have otherwise become as stale as an old baguette.

Like all great romances, The Lovers on the Bridge is propelled by tragedy. The film opens with Lavant’s unresponsive body being scraped off the pavement where he’s been run over in traffic. He’s washed & patched up by a city-run homeless shelter and then re-released back on the streets, where he immediately falls back into the self-destructive cycle that got him banged up in the first place — guzzling alcohol as intentional self-harm. Meanwhile, Binoche’s struggling artist is suffering a more medically diagnosable malady. Her eyesight is failing her due to a rare form of ocular degeneration that will soon leave her blind and unable to continue working. She’s relatively new to street life, while her drunkard firebreather lover appears to know how to thieve, grift, and glean with the best of ’em. After a short crime spree ties up some loose ends in Binoche’s former life as a semi-wealthy suburbanite, the pair quickly bond by getting wasted on cooking wine and laughing maniacally. Part of what makes their volatile dynamic so romantic is that either or both lovers could die at any moment, and they’re both selfish enough to die by the other’s hand in a desperate crime of passion. It almost plays a prank on the audience that the movie eventually ends on a moment of quiet sweetness, with Carax restaging the bus ride epilogue from The Graduate as an epiphanic embrace of the central romance instead of a reality-check rejection of it.

Contemporary movie nerds familiar with Leos Carax from the more recent, extravagant productions Holy Motors & Annette would know to expect an ecstatic, expressionistic visual style here that breaks away from the movie’s semi-documentary opening. Once Binoche & Lavant lock onto each other’s romantically nihilistic wavelength, the visual language soars — sometimes literally, mixing images of swarming birds and helicopters in a single, seemingly impossible shot. Their lives are small, tethered to a single stone bridge, but nothing about their depiction is simple. The painter cannot simply take her daily birth control pill; her lover must feed it to her via open-mouthed kiss. It’s not enough for the doomed pair to peer into the social lives of more fortunate & fashionable Parisians from the streets outside; the windows into nightclub are lowered to the pavement, so all that’s visible is the wealthy’s dancing feet & flashing lights. When laughing like children while high on bargain-bin wine, Carax uses a shift-tilt lens and oversized set decoration to physically shrink his performers in the frame. This expressionistic visual approach reaches its fever pitch during a grand bicentennial fireworks display, which is used as a backdrop for a Sinners-style musical sequence that mixes orchestral chamber music, Iggy Pop, Public Enemy, and Bal-musette accordion waltzes into one delirious post-modern cacophony. Improbably, it lands as one of the most romantic sequences of cinematic spectacle I can recall instead going full cornball. It’s also immediately followed by the lovers bonking a beat cop on the head and hijacking his boat for a joy ride, somehow escalating the visual spectacle even further through a brief detour into vaudevillian slapstick.

The Lovers on the Bridge was recently restored in a new 4k scan by Janus Films, and it’s currently bouncing around American arthouses. I recently caught it at The Broad’s weekly Gap Tooth Cinema rep series in New Orleans, weeks after Boomer reported it was playing alongside Carax’s Boy Meets Girl and Mauvais Sang at the Austin Film Society one state over. That loose thematic trilogy surprisingly makes up half of Carax’s total catalog of features, which means he’s not an especially intimidating auteur to catch up with in terms of prolificacy. There’s more out there than just Holy Motors, but not much more. The Lovers on the Bridge is as good of a place to start as any, since it’s so utterly romantic, so utterly violent, and so utterly, utterly French.

-Brandon Ledet

Pier Kids (2019)

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There’s a reason we’ve seen so many documentaries about homeless queer youth in America over the decades, especially on the festival circuit: it’s a huge fucking problem. Gay, trans, nonbinary, and otherwise queer children are especially vulnerable to being kicked out onto the street by their families, which often resigns them to high-risk lives of petty theft & sex work to get by in an increasingly hostile world. Many documentaries are (rightfully) drawn to signal-boosting these stories as a means to advocating for the kids locked in this never-ending epidemic, which makes for both an amplified political advocacy in total and a crowded field where it is difficult for any one individual film to distinguish itself in isolation. Pier Kids is one of many, many documentaries on a frequently covered (even if vital) topic. Its merits as an individual work can only be judged by two criteria, then: the specific kids it chooses to document and the way it handles presenting their story.

This particular queer homeless youth advocacy doc opens with seething commentary on the assumed POV in the cultural history of queer identity. A title card asserts that in the fifty years since the Stonewall Riots the narrative of modern gay rights has been dominated by cisgender White Gays, when the real work needs to be focused on protecting & uplifting POC homeless youth, especially black trans women. Other recent documentary work I’ve seen in this same line of advocacy has been centered on action & organization in “solving” this epidemic, like the unofficial Paris is Burning sequel Kiki and the gang violence “rehabilitation” effort Check It!. Pier Kids is seemingly more focused on calling attention to the problem than actively advocating for a specific solution, as it profiles individual homeless youths who frequent the piers of NYC in-between excursions in sex work & shoplifting. This matter-of-fact document of systemically ignored & discarded youth has plenty of intrinsic value without having to push for a more clearly defined solution to the problem, and the film is likely better for not reaching beyond its means for that lofty goal.

The title “Pier Kids” is especially telling in this approach, as it emphasizes that these young, homeless sex workers are disenfranchised children who’re struggling to establish a foundation of normality in a systemically cruel world. Like many docs in this milieu, the film dedicates much of its energy to parsing out the structure & functions of gay “families” – wherein veterans of the scene provide makeshift homes & parental guidance to their “gay children.” Cops, drunken Wall Street bros, and physically violent johns create a cruelly unfair, rigged system where financially desperate youths are solicited for sex, then suffer all the legal, emotional, and physical consequences for prostitution. Director Elegance Bratton can’t help themselves in vocally responding “Oh my god” and “I’m so sorry” to the more egregious horrors suffered by their subjects, but just as much room is left for tenderness & tough love shared in these chosen, D.I.Y. family structures. This is not an act of culture-gazing; it’s a slice of life look at a community with volatile ups & downs.

To its credit, Pier Kids openly acknowledges its small part in a larger documentary tradition. Glimpses at ball culture glamor and detailed explanations of differing vogueing “house” structures directly recall Paris is Burning. A central subject named Krystal Labeija Dixon encourages the audience to look up the Crystal Labeija’s infamous read from the landmark documentary The Queen on YouTube as an explanation of why she chose her name. Pier Kids’s cheap digital equipment leaves it with a cold visual palette that can’t compete with those early documentaries’ wonderfully grimy, color-saturated celluloid patina. Similarly, its soundtrack is often overwhelmed by the roar of traffic, the hum of mobile streetlight generators, and the menace of police sirens. However, its personal, intimate documentation of a new, specific crop of homeless queer kids is just as essential as any past works – if not only as confirmation that the epidemic is still ongoing. These children are still out there taking care of themselves & each other with no end or solution to this cycle in sight. I do hope there will be a day when these documentaries are no longer such a regular routine, but only in the sense that I hope for a future where they’re no longer necessary. We’re not there yet.

-Brandon Ledet

Street Trash (1987)

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The eternal trade-off in horror fandom is having to put up with a lot of cruelty & trash while searching for the gems, which means getting burned repeatedly for daring to seek relief in fictional & comedic violence. Shock horrors from the 70s & 80s are an especially tricky enterprise. They were birthed in a time where the genre was at its wildest, most over the top creative summit, but they also often gleefully depict rape & intentionally offend in their politics in a way that sours the party vibe. The infamous “melt movie” Street Trash perfectly encapsulates that trade-off in the span of a single picture. Street Trash‘s opening & closing stretches of goopy, psychedelic body horror deliver everything anyone could reasonably hope for in a VHS era genre picture, but its second act doldrums are an hour-long indulgence in horror’s worst, cruelest impulses. The film is just barely recommendable for the strength of its practical effects gore & impressive camera work alone, but more than half of its runtime is a dead-in-the-water descent into heartless rape humor and plotless vilification of the poor. It’s a microcosm of the horror genre in that way: mind-boggling art buried under a mountain of cruelty & trash.

Like the Mortville setting of John Waters’s Desperate Living, Street Trash is mostly confined to a grime-slathered homeless community, just outside of Proper Society’s periphery. Unlike in Waters’s film, this horror comedy has an open distaste for its characters, who mostly populate a junkyard shanty town constructed out of old cars & stacks of tires. Everyone in the film is a drunken, psychotic asshole coated in an opaque later of grime. The film directly acknowledges their plights under addiction, police harassment, war veteran PTSD, and general mental illness, but still mostly makes them out to be cretinous trash (hence the title). All dialogue is shouted or slurred as the homeless swarm NYC streets, clawing for spare change & desperately offering to wash car windshields for tips. It’s much like the dystopic Out of Control Teens panic of Class of 1999 in that way. There’s a satirical opportunity in visualizing wealth classes’ fears of the poor (like an inverse of Brian Yuzna’s Society), but Street Trash is too light on plot to pursue it. The mechanism of its horror spectacle is a poisonous case of a fortified wine called Viper that a convenience store clerk sells to the homeless for dirt cheap. When consumed, Viper melts its victims from the inside out, reducing them to puddles of multi-color acrylic goop & exploding flesh. It’s a killer conceit and it’s undeniably fun to watch this insular community get torn apart by this villainous poison. There’s ultimately no point behind its existence, however, as it’s merely a crate of expired liquor some bozo found in a storeroom wall. With a plot about corporate boardrooms plotting to poison homeless people en masse with Viper as a way to clear city streets (in the vein of Three the Hard Way or Black Dynamite), Street Trash might have had something to actually do in its second act. As is, the lack of a plot only leaves a vacuum the film intends to fill with rape humor & open gawking at homeless cretins.

The latex special effects work in Street Trash is undeniably impressive. The film is bookended with opening & closing 20min stretches of gorgeously grotesque, for-its-own-sake gore spectacle that makes the film feel like it has potential to be one of the greatest body horrors of all time. The hour between those bookends is brutally unfunny & nihilistically pointless, however. A psychotic Vietnam vet torturing his wino underlings and a murder investigation involving the mafia & a fatal gang rape stretch the movie way past a reasonable runtime for what it accomplishes as well as past a tone that anyone who’s not a teenage boy could possibly find comedic. As little as I enjoy 60% of its runtime, however, my horror nerd appreciation of the remaining forty minutes leave the film at least passably enjoyable. At the very least, it’s impressive that a film this obviously cheap is also so visually impressive. Not only are the special effects of the rainbow-colored, Viper-melted bodies a visual art triumph; the film is just generally well-shot for VHS era schlock, making great use of low to the ground tracking shots to build majesty & menace. Synapse’s recent restorative DVD release looks especially fantastic. With a lot of the cast appearing to be crew & their friends and the only recognizable faces being people like That One Guy From GoodFellas, The Frankenhooker Dude, and The Mom From Polyester, that visual achievement can’t be overpraised, as the film is an obvious labor of love. It’s just a shame that it declined to fully explore the implications of its poisoned homeless community in-between its most impressive stretches of flesh-melting violence. Even when a stray gag in its second act doldrums does pay off (like a Benny Hill-inspired routine involving a severed dick), it feels like that time might have been better spent investigating the originating source of Viper or further exploring the homeless community’s interactions with the equally assholish upper class. Better yet, it could have cut out the second act entirely & just stuck to Viper’s physical effects, as it obviously cannot be trusted to use its idle time well when afforded it.

-Brandon Ledet