65. Girl on the Bridge

Celebrated in France with eight Cesar nominations and a win for Daniel Auteuil (a great, world class actor who is certainly overlooked in the US) for Best Actor, Girl on the Bridge received little attention elsewhere, relegated to standard art house runs of a few weeks. Many who took the time to see this film fell in love with its erotically charged romanticism and stylish black and white presentation.

Adele (French pop star Vanessa Paradis) tells an interviewer in a mysteriously unexplained setting that she had a hardscrabble life and no luck at all. She was “a vacuum cleaner that picks up the dirt that was left behind.” Her life takes a fortuitous turn just as she is about to end it on a Parisian bridge when professional knife thrower Gabor (Daniel Auteuil, Un Coeur en Hiver) appears and offers her a job as his assistant. Telepathic Gabor believes Adele is his luck mate and he proves it over and over again, yet despairs as he watches her return to her promiscuous ways with handsome strangers in the resort towns they travel through. Gabor makes no move on her himself accept when he throws his knives at the writhing Adele in what are some of the greatest sex scenes in cinema history.

Director Patrice Leconte's (Monsieur Hire) wildly romantic, stunning film is a showcase for Auteuil, intense in eyeliner and obscenely garish floral jackets, expressing emotion even in the way he smokes a cigarette. Neophyte Paradis stands up to the actor's intense gaze and gives a flighty, fresh performance which grows deeper by film's end. Although Serge Frydman's script has a basic romantic structure, its themes of luck and its glamorous locations (Monte Carlo, Istanbul, casinos and circuses) give the story an exotic edge. Jean-Marie Dreujou's lighting and camera compositions are dazzling and Leconte inventively pairs them with Benny Goodman, Marianne Faithful and Arabic music. The film has a sense of humor as well -- Auteuil can be scathingly dry and there's an amusing visual when Adele makes love to a contortionist.

Girl on the Bridge epitomizes the magic that can be conjured when flickering light is projected onto a movie screen. It's an almost perfect film. (Laura Clifford)