| Pola Who? | |
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It's
trendy to refer to Leos Carax's The
Lovers on the Bridge (Les Amants du Pont-Neuf) as an overblown disaster,
but I have to admit that I rather liked the movie, which didn't make it to American
theatres until 10 years after its release in Europe. I saw it back in 1990,
and I still remember the glorious moment when Juliette Binoche and Denis Lavant
celebrate their love during the bicentennial of the French Revolution -- their
lives of abject misery and pain, set to the beat of Public Enemy, suddenly turn
sublimely beautiful as the urban grit gives way to a waltz, and before you know
it, they are water-skiing down the fireworks-illuminated Seine.
That transcendent moment has stuck with me, and now, the enfant terrible of contemporary French cinema is back with a new movie that follows quite the opposite trajectory: from pastoral beauty to raving industrial despair.
The story, based on Herman Melville's 1852 novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities, follows a beautiful, blond, rich, and khaki-clad writer (Guillaume Depardieu, the great Gérard's son) whose first novel was a stunning success and lives in a chateau with a mother who looks just like the aging Catherine Deneuve (Catherine Deneuve). He's about to get married to girl who lives in a mansion and is just as beautiful, blond, and has the same taste for lightly colored clothes as him. Everything is bright and joyful . . . but Pierre can't shake the feeling that he is being stalked by a mysterious stranger, a bag-carrying clochard with dark, long tangled hair (Katerina Golubeva).
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