That was an excellent one.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The third feature film by French screenwriter, film critic and director Leos Carax which underwent a complicated production process and took three years to complete, is an archetypal love-story set at a bridge undergoing reparation at Pont-Neuf in Paris, where painter Michèle who has recently left her boyfriend and fire-swallower Alex who is addicted to tranquilizing pills and alcohol coincidentally meet and form a relationship.This unusual romance about two opposite vagabonds crashing into one and other during the days leading up to the Bicentennial celebrations in France 1989, is noticeable for it's varied use of music, fine cinematography, fast editing, good pace and diverse filming. However, much of this films greatness comes from the terrific performances by Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche, whose magnetic presence turns this unorthodox love-story into a gripping character drama. The scenes they share stand out as the highlights of this film and they were passionately filmed and written by Leos Carax, who had to overcome severe financial difficulties in order to get the film made.

This "romantic" film was just so depressing and so unrealistic - it made it impossible for me to feel any sympathy or empathy for the 2 main characters and their desperate and desolate lives. I kept watching in the vain hope I'd find some redeeming feature but failed miserably. One has to have a touch of masochism to sit through this 2 hour endurance course! I came away with nothing that enriched my heart or mind in any way. It was just depressing watching these characters on their self-destructive binge! How love could sprout or thrive under such conditions and with such false motives is beyond me. One could only watch it in a detached way as it was just impossible to understand or identify with the main characters. Avoid it like the plague!

Leos Carax's film The Lovers on the Bridge isn't remarkable for its characterizations or its plot, although both of these elements are certainly adequate. Rather, it's remarkable for a few otherworldy scenes of unusual cinematic power. One such scene consists of the titular lovers (Alex, a deranged, fire-eating street performer and Michelle, a painter with a rare eye disease, both vagrants) on the otherwise deserted bridge (closed for renovation) during the Paris bicentennial fireworks celebration. As they cavort about the bridge the massive light show seems to have been arranged for the sole benefit of this unlikely pair; Carax absolutely makes the most of this sequence and the result is one of the most amazing scenes in cinema.Another remarkable sequence involves posters that Alex notices, first one in isolation and then all over the city, that he decides he must destroy to protect his burgeoning relationship with Michelle. It's surreal when he sets dozens of them on fire in a deserted subway; it's nightmarish when he finds a truck load of them and accidentally burns the driver along with his cargo.The Lovers on the Bridge shows a side of Paris that most films don't: while it is capable of creating beautiful sights like the fireworks show it's also a place full of dirty vagrants who form obsessive attachments not only to abandoned bridges but to each other as well, people who are capable of astonishing acts of violence and self destruction. Carax captures all this with a flair that enables him to transcend the thin plot he's working with and in so doing create a magical piece of cinema.

There are moments and scenes in Lovers on the Bridge that waver between being straightforward in their realism and the given grittiness of living life on the streets homeless and of those sudden romantic bursts that are also a given if you're French and wanting to show how wonderful and horrible it can be in a strange situation. There are many I could point to, but there's also a suddenness to the work, moments that pop out and make the viewer put into perspective the tragic nature of this story and the characters. There's an unpredictability, but not without logic or something in line with life in this situation and place.One such moment that few reviewers may talk about involves the character of Hans and his death. Throughout the film he's been more than wary of the presence of half-blind Michelle (Binoche) who has also fallen in (possible) love with Alex (Lavant) the drunken/druggie fire-breather, and for a while we as the audience see him as a rather ugly being. But then he opens up to Michelle- how he came to be on this bridge without a job, or without his wife and the death of his child- and he offers her to take her to a museum, which he has a key for from his job as a guard, to see a painting as close to the surface as possible late at night. He's actually quite a touching character gradually, still grumpy and grisly but with a conscience and feeling for Michelle's plight... Then as he walks down a set of stairs and comes to the side of the riverbank he slips and falls and dies.In any other hands this could become high melodrama, a director pulling out all the stops to make this a really significant event for these character Michelle and Alex. But just as soon as he was there, he's gone, and I was overwhelmed for a moment by pure anguish at this man's demise. There's other moments like that as well in Carax's film, where he substitutes stark poetry- or something truly alive and fast and ebullient poetry with his camera and wonderful, expensive set (some of the time)- and balances so satisfyingly between the grime and clutter of this little enclave on the bridge and the torrid love between two people who are together for various reasons, some known well and some intimated by just the slightest moves (or lack thereof). With some minor exceptions like the very end, which leads to some curious and surreal ambiguity, it's a sensational ride.We're taken along on the story of Alex, a fire-breather as his only trade and with hobbies of booze and drugs in order to sleep, and Michelle, a painter who has nowhere to go except to old lovers she'd rather not see, or can't see because of flailing eyesight (or, if she does, bad things happen- or appear to happen, again the ambiguity). They become very close, maybe too close for the extremely lonely and possibly brain damaged Alex, and pull off a money making scheme, which ends with a moment of a selfish act, as well as have nights of debauchery and excitement. The most notable of the latter, probably of the best kinds of exuberant, crazy type scenes in any motion picture, is when Alex and Michelle, smashed to hell, run and jump and dance to a giant fireworks display, with Carax pumping up Iggy Pop and Blue Danube Waltz music, and finishing off with a water-skiing down the river. This is one of those sequences I probably will never forget, not just for the power of the film-making but for the feeling one has for the characters at that moment of time in the movie: sublime, momentary escapism.Things end up getting very dark for the characters, not least of which for Alex who goes on a rampage tearing down posters looking for Michelle for an eye-operation (this is one of those scenes that goes between reality and fantasy that's jarring: it verges on pretension, but I actually didn't mind it for how wrapped up one becomes in the plight of Alex with "his" Michelle), and the ending finds the two years later, changed only on the surface. All the old wounds are there, and how they'll exactly end up is difficult to say. But what is clear for Carax, after going through a story that features real homeless people in shelters (this footage shot like a documentary, plunging us so far into this world we forget most of the time the bridge is a set), of numerous fights and cries and hugs and laughs and fights between the two would-be/may-be lovebirds, that what would be cynical in any other hands is treated as bittersweet humanism. Carax cares for these characters deeply, even the troubled Alex, and it's important to understand that in their downfall. A+