The Lovers on the Bridge (1991)

September 12, 2025September 12, 2025 / swampflix / 2 Comments

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

Meet Maigret

July 5, 2025September 13, 2025 / swampflix / Leave a comment

Literary police detective Jules Maigret was featured in at least 75 mystery novels published from the 1930s to the 1970s. The Maigret series was such an immediate hit that the fictional detective was adapted to cinema starting in the first year of publication, and he’s such an enduring literary icon that he’s still being portrayed in prestige television series, most recently by Gerard Depardieu. There’s a statue erected in his honor in the Netherlands where the first Maigret novel was written, despite his fictional & cultural home base being Paris, France. Personally, I’ve never heard of the guy. Considering the near-century of continued circulation & celebration, I have to assume that Maigret is as popular of a literary figure as fellow mystery-novel icons Sam Spade, Philip Marlow, Miss Marple, and Hercule Poirot. However, the first time I ever saw his name in print was on the covers of used DVDs at a local Goodwill, where I recently picked up two 1950s adaptations of famous Maigret novels directed by Jean Delannoy. The completionist in me would normally be intimidated by a new movie-watching project like this, since getting the full scope of Maigret’s cinematic output would mean watching a half-dozen actors portray the character across at least a dozen films. I’m not doing all that. Delannoy only directed two of those Maigret features, though, and they both starred Jean Gabin in the titular role. That’s about as manageable of a crash course as possible for such a prolific film subject.

Unsurprisingly, Delannoy & Gabin’s Maigret collaborations aren’t especially interested in introducing new audiences to the already-long famous character. They are both self-contained mysteries that presume audience familiarity with the titular detective, the same way a modern adaptation of The Hounds of Baskervilles wouldn’t feel the need to explain the basic character traits of Sherlock Holmes. So, 1958’s Maigret Sets a Trap is not especially helpful as an introduction to Maigret’s whole deal, but its central murder mystery is shocking & compelling enough for that not to matter. If anything, Jules Maigret is protective of his identity, hiding his personal feelings behind a mask of strait-laced, middle-aged machismo, with Jean Gabin playing the detective as the French equivalent of George C. Scott. As buttoned-up & conservative as Maigret can be, however, the crimes he’s tasked to solve are shockingly salacious. In this first outing, he must scheme to trap a serial “killer of sluts,” a psychosexual freak who’s been stabbing anonymous women in Parisian alleyways as punishment for the alleged sins of their gender. As soon as the audience meets the killer halfway through the film, his guilt is obvious, shifting the “whodunnit” structure into a “whydunnit” story instead, with Maigret boiling to an angry intensity as he hammers the suspect during interrogation into a full confession. The remaining mystery is in discovering his motivation and accomplice, untangling an unseemly tale of cuckoldry, impotence, and homosexual repression covered up by his doting mother & frustrated wife. The shadowy alleyways and mood-setting jazz of the early killings promise the genre trappings of a 1950s noir, but the details of the case eventually lead to Maigret Sets a Trap operating as a French precursor to Psycho & Peeping Tom. Maigret may not have the expressive charisma of a Sam Spade or a Norman Bates, but he does walk the streets of their shared sordid world.

In Delannoy & Gabin’s second Maigret outing, the detective becomes a little more personable to the audience through some nostalgic soul-searching. 1959’s Maigret and the Saint Fiacre Case sends him back to the rural hometown he left as a teenager to pursue a law enforcement career in the big city. There, he fails to protect the heiress of the local estate who was his first boyhood crush, and must spend the rest of the film solving her murder after it’s committed before his very eyes. At this point, it’s still difficult to fully understand what makes Maigret special detective after getting to know him over two films, but he can at least be narrowed down to a few scattered attributes: middle-aged, pipe smoker, mostly quiet but shouts during interrogations, detests ninnies & “dilettantes”, etc. This second case is much more of a traditional whodunnit than the first, with a wide field of nervous, effeminate weirdos serving as possible suspects for the overly severe brute to expose. Will the killer be the countess’s playboy heir, the gigolo art critic, the sexually repressed priest, or the pipsqueak bank teller who rides into town on a Vespa scooter? I found the field of suspects to be a clearly distinguished type but the exact guilty party to be entirely unpredictable. In a way, their contrast against the more traditional, stoic masculinity of the detective on the case is the greater crime that must be solved, which opens up this duo of films to a range of strangely reactionary sexual politics. At the very least, it seems like the appeal of these Maigret stories is partly that the mysteries he gets wrapped up in are way more salacious & distinctive than the detective solving them. He’d much rather be at home having a cup of coffee with his adoring housewife than getting his hands dirty with the effete riff raff of modern urban life, but duty calls, and it calls often.

As soon as its opening credits sequence, Maigret Sets a Trap nails down the iconography of Maigret’s detective work. Maigret is introduced through the silhouette of his signature pipe, casting a massive shadow over a map of Paris – an image that is violently interrupted by the stab of a dagger onto the city streets. That visual stylishness continues throughout the picture, with Dellanoy constantly moving the camera to capture every inch of the mise-en-scène and even experimenting with some 1st-person POV cinematography while navigating Parisian alleyways. The details of the case get surprisingly gruesome for a mainstream 50s production too, with frank depictions of rape, bloodshed, and male sex work upending standards & expectations set by Hays Code-inhibited Hollywood productions of the era. for In contrast, The Saint Fiarce Case is much more generic detective-novel fodder, with only occasional excursions to modern strip clubs & printing presses breaking up what’s essentially a by-the-books Old Dark House story. It’s most interesting as an attempt to pick at the personal backstory & hang-ups of a character who’s protective of his privacy even to his audience, whereas Sets a Trap stands on its own as a great film regardless of its connections to other Maigret tales. Jean Gabin was so celebrated for his portrayal of the character that he was later invited to return to the role in 1963’s Maigret Sees Red, well after Jean Delannoy had moved on to direct other projects. Personally, I didn’t get to know Maigret well enough over these two films to be on the hook for his continued adventures unless, like Maigret Sets a Trap, the mysteries he’s tasked to solve in them sound especially shocking or prurient. It would take another chance meeting at the second-hand shop to spend more time with the detective, so it’s unlikely I’ll ever fully get to know the man behind the pipe.

-Brandon Ledet

Crazy Horse (2011)

January 5, 2024January 5, 2024 / swampflix / 2 Comments

I would’ve watched my first Frederick Wiseman movie a lot sooner if someone told me he made a fly-on-the-wall nudie cutie. By all accounts, Wiseman’s documentaries are the height of observational, humanist filmmaking, but I can never quite motivate myself to actually watch one. A three-and-a-half-hour documentary about the current state of the New York Public Library system? A four-hour doc about the daily operations of a Michelin Star restaurant? A four-and-a-half-hour doc about the inner-workings of Boston’s municipal government? I often hear that these are some of the very best documentaries ever made, but they always sound more like doing homework or serving jury duty than watching a movie. There’s no valor in being incurious, though, so I did eventually find a Wiseman picture that met me halfway (by cutting his late-period runtimes in half) and spoke to one of my personal cinematic interests (sex). The 2011 doc Crazy Horse finds Wiseman hanging out in the titular Parisian strip club, documenting the backstage & onstage mechanics of its decades-running cabaret act. It’s a series of cutesy, old-fashioned stripteases occasionally interrupted by nitpicking arguments between dancers, choreographers, and producers about how the staging of the show should evolve. It delivers all of the usual step-by-step procedural storytelling of the fly-on-the-wall documentary approach Wiseman helped pioneer, except mildly spiced up with a little early Russ Meyer nudie picture kitsch. I can’t speak for everyone, but I would personally much rather hang around behind the stage of a Parisian burlesque than behind a desk at Boston City Hall, which made Crazy Horse the ideal entry point into Wiseman’s catalog.

I obviously can’t compare the stylistic approach of Crazy Horse to Wiseman’s more iconic works, but I will say it’s a lot less … dry than I expected. Sure, he locks the camera onto a single, fixed horizontal plane for long, lingering shots, but in this case it’s to capture the fluid movements of a nude body under psychedelic gel lights. There are also wordless montages of those gel lights switching on or off or switching colors, like the marquees lighting up at dusk sequence of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Wiseman might be a notoriously patient, restrained filmmaker, but even he can’t resist framing the stage performances of Crazy Horse with a touch of the razzle-dazzle pizazz with which Bob Fosse framed Cabaret; no one could. Self-promoted as “the best chic nude show in town,” the Crazy Horse stage show provides plenty of psychedelic-kitsch eye candy to fill a feature-length documentary. Wiseman being who he is, though, he also drags his cameras to the mundane meeting rooms, merch stands, and projection booths that make the magic happen – documenting long, circular debates about the future of the show. You get the sense watching the performances that not much has changed about the Crazy Horse cabaret act since it was first staged in the 1950s (besides maybe some technological stagecraft, some musical novelties, and the occasional celebrity appearance from someone like Dita Von Teese, who appears on background posters through the film), and yet the choreographer endlessly argues with other staff about the evolving creative vision of the show. It’s an empire built on cheap thrills, cheap champagne, and even cheaper pop music, but it’s treated like the staging of a high-art opera. The great joy of Wiseman’s film is in how he’s willing to underline the irony of those passionate discussions, while also fully indulging in the visual beauty of what those artists are fighting for.

A lot of the backstage bickering about the creative direction of Le Crazy Horse Saloon is a classic art vs. commerce debate. On one side, there’s the poetic visionary who draws inspiration for his choreography from his dreams; on the other, there are off-screen investors insisting on the most consistent, lucrative show possible to keep the money flowing. The commerce side of that debate can be outright grotesque, particularly in a sequence where hopeful dancers are auditioned for the aesthetics of their bodies instead of their talents as performers. The art speaks for itself, though, and as corny as some of the sub-Busby Berkeley stripteases can feel conceptually, there’s a genuine elegance to their artistry that goes far beyond mere sexual titillation. I wonder how often Wiseman’s had to sit through similar debates about the commercial viability of his own work throughout the decades. He’s a well-venerated auteur at this point, but even the most adventurous moviegoing audiences can be intimidated by the seemingly mundane stories he chooses to tell. I hear that his new film Menus-Plaisirs is one of the best documentaries of the year, but I’ve spent far too much of my life working in commercial kitchens to want to return there for another four sweaty hours. Even the two-hour stretch of Crazy Horse wore on me a little once I got the full scope of the movie’s subject, and this one features glittery titties & swinging tassels instead of lengthy meetings with a local city council. I enjoyed my time with Wiseman and the girls, but I’ll also confess that it still felt like clocking in for a shift at work. I felt like I was a Crazy Horse busboy for a night, a gig that only a teenage Parisians could fully love.

-Brandon Ledet

Wallay (2017)

November 27, 2017November 27, 2017 / swampflix / 1 Comment

A somewhat common narrative from recent European indies has been detailing the lives of the massive immigrant communities that live in the large housing block projects at the fringes of cities like London & Paris. Titles like Girlhood, Swagger, and Attack the Block have found an unfathomably wide range of stories to tell within that context, but remain confined to those insular communities in a kind of stationary, immersive experience. The recent French indie Wallay offers a take on the housing block immigrant experience I haven’t seen before by transporting its subjects to a drastically external, literally foreign setting. Wallay is worthy in its own right as an endearing coming of age story about a second-generation French immigrant learning small scale lessons about responsibility, romance, and identity, but those are familiar story beats we’ve seen many times before. It feels much more unique & revelatory in the way it details the cultural limbo immigrants occupy between the European cities that keep them at arm’s length & the African villages they left for economic opportunity by thoughtfully profiling both ends of that divide.

A second-generation, teenage French immigrant butts heads with his exasperated father who cannot control his behavior. A little badass in a bucket hat, the teenage delinquent commits minor acts of small scale rebellion in his Parisian housing block for payoffs as glorious as black market tennis shoes & appearing in YouTube-upload rap videos. He runs into trouble when he’s caught committing one of his more egregious schemes, siphoning off funds from the money orders his father sends back home to their extended family in West Africa. As punishment, he’s sent to the African village where his father was raised to live with the family he stole from, where he is tasked with paying back the money through months of manual labor. As a spoiled brat, he of course initially refuses to participate in this lesson in humility, scoffing in horror at his new “home’s” infrequent power supply & lack of indoor plumbing, His struggle to adjust to & learn from his mistakes is especially apparent in his relationship with his new caretaker & would-be employer, a harsh authority figure of an uncle. The language & cultural barriers between the mismatched pair eventually break down in the exact ways you’d expect them to, but Wallay finds plenty of delicate moments of humility, romance, familial love, and personal growth in the struggle, with many of them being solidly, endearingly comedic.

Berni Goldblat’s directorial debut saw its American premiere at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival. Outside a few scenes of its bratty teen protagonist struggling to trek through African wilderness or listening to hip-hop in headphones inside a mosquito tent, Wallay is only about a visually striking as you’d expect from a mini-budget indie with those means of distribution. The film finds its own tonal groove elsewhere, though, especially in its minimalist, plucked cello score & its circumcision-obsessed cultural humor, which can be much cruder than you’d expect from this kind of story. Teen actor Makan Nathan Diarra also elevates Wallay with genuine character moments as the lead grows into a better, more empathetic person. Mostly, though, the film feels significant in the way it adds a new wrinkle to the European housing block narrative by giving that community an external perspective. These kids really are caught halfway between two identities and I haven’t seen that cultural limbo represented onscreen quite like this before.

-Brandon Ledet

Roger Ebert Film School, Lesson 27: Galia (1966)

April 26, 2017April 26, 2017 / swampflix / 1 Comment

Roger Ebert Film School is a recurring feature in which Brandon attempts to watch & review all 200+ movies referenced in the print & film versions of Roger Ebert’s (auto)biography Life Itself.

Where Galia (1966) is referenced in Life Itself: On page 156 of the first edition hardback, Ebert recalls his early days as a professional film critic. He writes, “The first film I reviewed for the Sun-Times was Galia, from France. I watched it from a center seat in the Old World Playhouse, bursting with the awareness that I was reviewing it, and then I went back to the office and wrote that it was one more last gasp of the French New Wave, rolling ashore. That made me sound more insightful than I was.”

What Ebert had to say in his review: “Georges Lautner’s Galia opens and closes with arty shots of the ocean, mother of us all, but in between it’s pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave. Ever since the memorable Breathless (1960) and Jules and Jim, and the less memorable La Verite, we have been treated to a parade of young French girls running gaily toward the camera in slow motion, their hair waving in the wind in just such a way that we know immediately they are liberated, carefree, jolly and doomed. Poor Galia is another.” -from his 1966 review for the Chicago Sun-Times

When teenage girls gaze into the Eiffel Tower posters that adorn their bedroom walls, I imagine the ideal Parisian life they long for is the one depicted in Galia. The titular protagonist of this mildly sexed-up French drama is a small town 20-something who moved to Paris to make do as a carefree shop girl. She lives alone in a studio apartment, frequently indulges in casual sex, smokes like a chimney outside and inside her favorite cafés, sketches strangers in her notepad, and just generally enjoys a young adult’s freedom without any significant responsibilities. Over the course of the film Galia is shaken out of her carefree reverie into a more recognizable adult existence, but a large part of the movie’s charm is that initial fantasy of an artistic Parisian life. I suppose that was the intent of director Georges Lautner in the first place. Lautner often verbally criticized the hoity-toity inventiveness of his contemporaries in the French New Wave and instead poised himself as something of a populist, crafting critically ignored works that were popularly broadcast on French television. Galia‘s lighthearted whimsy plays right into that sense of entertainment-for-its-own-sake populism, even when it deviates from that Parisian fantasy into topics as hefty as adultery, betrayal, and suicide.

Galia has her first taste of responsibility-hindered adult life when she saves a woman from drowning in a river and offers her a place to stay. When she discovers that the woman attempted suicide over a dispute with her husband, she finds the reasoning ridiculous. To Galia, there are way too many hot, young bachelors in Paris to focus on just one, therefore “men aren’t worth killing yourself over.” To help break this woman out of her marital rut, Galia convinces her to continue to play dead, as if the suicide were successful. She then spies on the husband as a proxy to gauge his reaction to his recent loss, turning the crisis into a frivolous game of espionage whimsy. It’s not a very well thought-out plan. Galia inevitably falls head over heels for the cheating, suicide-inspiring husband despite the wife’s protests, even following him on a romantic weekend getaway in Venice. If you’re going to track her arc as a character throughout the film, I suppose the lesson she learns by accidentally falling in love with this obvious lout is that romance can inspire you to do drastic things, like jump off a bridge or contemplate a murder, no matter how many hot, available men are walking the streets of Paris. The love triangle between the carefree shop girl, the nearly-drowned woman, and her emotionally abusive husband can only drive towards an inevitably tragic end, which is a shame, because Galia works best when it functions like a lighthearted, whimsical comedy.

Because Georges Lautner seems to have an anti-intellectual air to his directorial style, Galia‘s worst moments are when it strays from presenting a comedic fantasy about a sex-positive shop girl into echoing more traditional French New Wave territory. Exchanges like, “Life is not much,” “Death is nothing at all,” and occasional “artsy” choices like scrolling the opening credits over negative footage of beach waves or indulging in an unconvincingly abstract nightmare sequence are embarrassingly flat in their half-hearted stabs at pretension, almost to the point of New Wave parody. Just about the only times this mild attempt at artfulness feels genuine or worthwhile is when Lautner aims to depict sexuality. Close-ups of drinking straws & cigarettes touching women’s tongues or young bodies twirling in wet bathing suits make for the rare artfully crafted image where Lautner doesn’t feel as if he’s asleep at the wheel. There’s also a brief detour to a weird, drunken orgy hosted by the cheating husband and a business associate that straddles both sides of the line, the engaged and the inept, as if it were plucked directly from a Doris Wishman picture. These questionably artistic deviations are few & far between, though. Mostly, Galia plays like a harmless, sexed-up melodrama and a teen girl’s fantasy of a liberated life in gay Paree.

In the long run, the most significant aspect of Galia might be that it was the subject of Roger Ebert’s first film review for the Chicago Sun-Times, the publication that defined the critic’s career as a writer. In that review, he lightly criticizes the film for being a poor, late-in-the-game example of The French New Wave. That point feels a little disingenuous, given how much the film feels largely uninterested in art film pretension, choosing to instead chase a mildly sexy, highly melodramatic form of crowd-pleasing populism. I will concede that its most artsy, New Wavy aspects were its biggest stumbling blocks, though. Galia is recommendable as a taste of whimsical Parisian fantasy and a cheap shot melodrama, but anyone looking for the attention to visual craft and philosophical dilemmas typically associated with modern French Cinema is certain to walk away disappointed, as it sounds like Roger did.