Herald Rating: * * *
Cast: Daniel Auteuil, Vanessa Paradis
Director: Patrice Leconte
Rating: M
Running time: 90 minutes
Opens: Now showing, Academy
Review: Peter Calder
For an extraordinary six-minute opening sequence, the camera lingers on the face of Vanessa Paradis. She talks - unprompted and uninterrupted, intimately as one might to a therapist - about the emotional chaos of her life ("I don't remember a day when I didn't feel let down. Everything I touch turns sour").
A sudden cutaway reveals that she is being watched by several people at least and perhaps even a roomful. Who they are and what their presence portends is never explained, but it lays a foundation of mystery on which the accomplished Leconte (who made The Hairdresser's Husband and the sublime Monsieur Hire) constructs a haunting and unusual love story.
Paradis, a gamine waif who came to fame as a singer and one of the faces of Chanel, is Adele, young, beautiful and doomed in love who, when we meet her for the second time, is poised to become a girl off a bridge. She is stopped - well, sort of - by Gabor (the prolific Auteuil manages never to remind us of previous roles as he reinvents himself) a knife-throwing circus performer down on his luck and desperately in need of a glamorous partner to stand up against a wall for him.
The set-up is saturated in a lugubrious sort of humour - she's an ideal candidate for the job, he reasons, because she's not desperate to stay alive and there's a later running gag involving Band Aids (he never told her he was perfect).
But The Girl on the Bridge is mainly concerned with the process by which a platonic, slightly despairing partnership can transmute into a love which is not doomed.
The film makes plenty of use of the sexual symbolism of the knives, but it would be mischievous to overstate it because there's something more subtle at work here; for both Adele and Gabor, life is a perilous undertaking and love is the greatest danger of all. Each offers to the other the chance of respite from the patterns of their life which she compare to a torn bill - "the two halves are worthless apart."
Shot in a radiant black and white wide screen, this is an intimate and well-observed character piece hampered at moments by some slightly forced cinematic trickery. In the context of Leconte's work as a whole, it may not stand out, but it is nonetheless an absorbing little picture.
The Girl on the Bridge
AdvertisementAdvertise with NZME.