Exuberant and cockeyed, Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf is a punk paean to mad love. Set in the center of Paris during bicentennial celebrations of the French Revolution in 1989, the film matches two homeless people who meet as squatters on the Pont-Neuf while it is closed for restorations. Denis Lavant is a whacked-out street-performing flame-eater; Juliet Binoche is a well-to-do young artist who has lost her love and is losing her sight, and thus lands on the street in despair. Juliet’s radiance is dulled almost enough for you to believe in her as a street person. The intensely combustible, insanely desparate energy the pair bring to their affair lights up a dark, dead-end existence. And the visual energy Carax brings to every frame, the mad movie love that has him quoting both The Graduate and L’Atalante in the final scene, draws the viewer into a grim setting to find an almost-believable hope in the anarchic power of love. (1991, dvd, n.) *7+*
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