les amants du pont-neuf

sunday, february 14, 1999:
7 pm

photo:
LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF

Celebrating the publication of a new book by critic Stuart Klawans--with a special screening of Leos Carax's LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF followed by a book-signing by the author in the Frieda and Roy Furman Gallery at the Walter Reade Theater.

"You may already know that Mr. Klawans is one of the most incisive, provocative and best-informed film critics in America. Now you can delight in the full, astonishing scope of his mind as revealed in Film Follies. He here takes the measure not only of cinema but also of the culture in which it grows (by hook and by crook). His work is both scholarly and, at times, so funny that you might want to spread the pleasure by reading it aloud to everyone in your vicinity." -- Vincent Canby

Stuart Klawans, a former "American Notes" columnist for the TLS, is currently film critic for The Nation. His new book is a history and theory of going too far: Film Follies examines those rare pictures that are both cinematic landmarks and monuments to a director's hubris, from Griffith's Intolerance through Coppola's Apocalypse Now and Carax's LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF. Seeming madness and wasteful extravagance, fantastic architecture and the haphazard structure of a musical revue--such are the watermarks of those improbably great (and greatly improbable) films Klawans calls "follies." Their reputations for financial excess may or may not be deserved; their aesthetic delirium cannot be denied. From Greed to Duel in the Sun to Ishtar, such films, labeled disruptive, unruly, in violation of normal procedure, shed a revealing light on the culture that judges them "out of order."

A Valentine's Day Film for Movie Lovers:
LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF
Leos Carax, France, 1991; 120m
A love story that dances in between the magical cinema-worlds of Jean Vigo and Stanley Donen. The dancers are Alex (Denis Lavant) and Michèle (Juliette Binoche). He is an acrobatic, slackfaced troll who puts on fire-spitting demonstrations in the street...and she is an eye-patched painter whose sight is disappearing along with her hope. Their amour fou gets played out in a string of strange, precisely colored scenes--most astonishingly in a set-piece on the night of the Bastille Day celebration, with fireworks erupting above and around them as they traipse madly across the [Pont-Neuf] bridge (and later water-ski down the Seine), sparklers falling around them like hot, spent starlight. No real location could support the stylized and delirious beguine of this movie; it requires the plaster sets that Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron whirled beside in An American in Paris. --Robert Horton, Film Comment