(1991; French) From the viewpoint inside a car cruising through the night streets of Paris, we glimpse a couple in the front seats before the vehicle runs over the ankle of a boy prostate in the road. The automobile careens away, and we follow the waif as he's picked up by authorities along with other "bottles and bodies," the empties and social detritus of the French capital as it's about to celebrate the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Taken to a clinic and shelter, Alex (Denis Lavant) has his foot set into a cast and given a single-arm crutch before he hops back to the Pont Neuf, the oldest of Parisian bridges, closed until 1991 for restoration. Here he lives with an old wino, Hans, who provides him with downers to sleep. In his alcove he discovers a girl asleep on the bench. Hans hollers at her she must leave and can't come back, but Alex having seen a painting she's done of him, intercedes and wins her the privilege of a few days only.

Michele (Juliette Binoche) has a patch over her left eye, a portfolio of her work, and a cat, Louisiana, for companion. She passes out while doing Alex's portrait. Finding a letter to her from Marion, Alex goes to the address in St Cloud and stealthily removes her diary from the studio.

An evening street performer who breathes fire, Alex dances with his cast to earn money; he steals wine and scavenges for food for the three of them. He then chases Michele through the underground; she emerges at the doorway of Julien, her former lover, and fires her pistol at him through the peephole.

Back on the bridge at night with Alex, spectacular fireworks erupting into the sky throughout the city, she asks him to count the bullets in her semiautomatic; he assures her all fifteen are in the magazine, none missing, before she suggests they each fire seven bullets, saving one for later. They get drunk and dance, steal a speedboat and race through the Seine with her on a ski. When she asks him to throw away the gun, he tosses his shoe over instead.

Hans at first denies Alex his downer, telling the boy there is no love on this bridge or in his world, forget it - the girl must go. Michele reveals to Hans that she's going blind, telling him of her remaining wish to see a painting in the Louvre; softening his earlier harshness toward her, he explains that the streets are no place for a young woman.

He once had a steady job (a security guard at the museum with keys), a family and wife before his little girl died, after which his wife left him to roam the city. He found her dead at 33 and hurled her body into the river.

Alex leaves her a poetic message with a code to answer an inquiry of affection. "The sky is white today," she says. "But the clouds are black," he replies. She tells him to lay off the poison and try sleeping beside her: "We'll make love, sure we will, but not yet." Casting off his cast, Alex and Michele use Hans's vials to drug and rob people; but after they've collected 2000 francs, she accidentally (with Alex's contrivance) knocks the money box off the bridge into the water.

Hans takes Michele to see the self-portrait of Rembrandt by candlelight, but her absence enrages Alex who strikes her. "You're so closed - open up," she says to him. Hans falls into the river and drowns. "You'll be the last image in my head," she tells Alex, "my white cane … my seeing-eye dog." Without Hans, Alex has no one but Michele, his love drug.

On the subway walls Alex discovers dozens of posters of a girl who's been missing for six months: Michele Stalens, 24, has a rare eye disease; if found in time her sight might be saved. Alex, attempting to destroy all of the posters, sets a car on fire with bundles more posters, resulting in the unintentional death of the car's owner.

On a radio Alex had found and given her, Michele hears a report of the search to find her. After shooting himself in the hand, Alex Vogan is captured and sentenced to three years in prison for manslaughter. In 1991 Michele visits him: "I thought I'd forgotten you," but images in her dreams sent her back to see him.

Their bridge has been repaired; Alex no longer limps but has a prosthetic in place of a hand. Nothing is irreparable, she assures him, promising to meet him on the Pont Neuf in six months.

At Christmas in the snow, she sketches another portrait of him, telling him she will someday reveal other secrets about herself. On the bridge she repeats a hilarious joke she'd heard with the punch line: "Because tonight's the night!"

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Copyright © 2007 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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