Terrell-4 She: Suicidal, about to jump off a bridge. He: A carnival knife thrower. Would you like to be my target, he asks. Sounds like a match made in heaven. Patrice Leconte's La Fille sur le Ponte may be a bit of quirky romantic fluff, but its great fluff. It's a diverting entertainment without much purchase, thank goodness, for the admiration of deeper meanings with which some Anglo cinephiles deaden the experience of good French movies. It's the story of two people who probably could only exist in the movies. Adele (Vanessa Paradis) is 21, endlessly compliant and endlessly unlucky in love (and with just about everything else, too.) She's a charming gamin, especially if you're the guy trying to pick her up. "Boys attract me," she says, "like beautiful clothes. I always want to try them on." At last she figures out that, for her, while sex is a friendly thing, it never seems to last or to work into anything else. "Funny, isn't it, how people can seem madly in love when they're not. It must be easy to fake." So there she is one evening about to jump off a bridge. Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), an older man, tries to talk her out of jumping. He'd like her to be his target. With her figure and his skill, they'll be a hit...although, he points out, "past the age of 40 knife throwing becomes erratic." She decides to jump anyway. He rescues her and before long they are an act. Adele continues to offer her innocently explicit friendship to those she encounters. She discovers a gift for luck. Gabor? Well, Adele and Gabor develop a distinctly odd approach to intimacy...knife throwing. Giving and receiving seems to bring out all the heavy breathing and beads of perspiration one would expect from the other activity. Note: Do not try this at home just to find out for yourself. What starts as a clever, funny suicidal set up moves into a clever, amusing story about knife throwing as a metaphor for sex and roulette as a metaphor for...well, maybe a relationship. It's so off-kilter, and Adele and Gabor are so attractive and interesting, that their quirky relationship is almost a guilty pleasure to watch. Will Adele decide to move a little so she can find out if one of Gabor's thrown knives is better than a young man's.... Will Gabor ever decide to try something other than a knife to intrigue Adele with.... Will Leconte's amusing mixture of luck, cold steel, eroticism, clever dialogue and shrewd acting come to a happy ending? When things begin to edge a little too close to what passes as seriousness in the movies, about three-quarters of the way through, Leconte has the good sense to pull back. This, after all, is a quirky romantic comedy done with flourishes and knives. You should see the movie. It's well worth it. Daniel Auteuil, one of the screen's great actors, manages to make of Gabor a man with an interestingly unspoken life for us to think about. When a movie depends on quick, clever dialogue, it needs to be delivered matter-of-factly, with no delays for glances, sighs or eye work. Auteuil's matter-of-factness is as deliberately amusing as his lines. Paradis, on the other hand, must make this young woman who lies down so willingly someone we like. Not only does Paradis give us pleasure in sex, when she's around she makes us feel almost young, innocent and erotic ourselves. And how nice it is to see a beautiful star actress without perfect teeth. Some critics have noted the several affectionate references to well known French films Leconte places in The Girl on the Bridge. I wouldn't know. I was too busy enjoying the movie. However, for those who might be intrigued enough to watch some of Leconte's other movies, he'll give you a variety of emotions to deal with. My favorites include Monsieur Hire, full of uneasiness and uncomfortable feelings; The Widow of Saint-Pierre, which comes close to tragedy; Ridicule, as malicious and amusing as you could wish; and my favorite to date, Man on the Train, a wonderful, thoughtful movie of sadness, regret and fulfillment. The Girl on the Bridge is beautifully photographed in black and white.

Asa_Nisi_Masa2 ... this one's very far from being one of them, unfortunately.Populist detractors of French cinema, knee-jerk Europhobes, phobics of subtitles, blinkered viewers who divide all cinema between Hollywood vs. "pretentious" art-house: if you really want to pick on a French movie that you think embodies all the clichés of Gallic cinema you so love to hate, take your vitriol out on this one! Leave masters like Rivette, Truffaut, Resnais, Rohmer, Denis, Varda and other, much better Leconte movies alone! La Fille Sur le Pont's main players: Gabor, a middle-aged man played by the ubiquitous, but always pleasant to watch Daniel Auteuil and Adèle, a lithely beautiful, gazelle-like young woman who has the face of Vanessa Paradis. Predictably, Adèle is emotionally messed up, fragile and yet sexually promiscuous. The two meet when the charismatic grouch, Gabor, intercepts the girl on a Parisian bridge and prevents her from committing suicide (wasn't that also how Emmanuelle Béart's character and her boyfriend met in La Belle Noiseuse?). Gabor is an itinerant knife-thrower, by the way - sans toit ni loi. Naturally enough, since we are talking about a girl who has nothing to lose, Adèle becomes his target. Despite the rocky beginning, in which the two spend much time squabbling, there is naturally a strong attraction between them (in fact, as clichéd as all this may sound, the first 20 minutes of the movie, in which Gabor and Adèle's relationship is first established, were my favourites). We even get to meet a previous living target of Gabor's, a woman now performing in another circus number, at the venue where Adèle is about to perform for the first time. We see that this "ex" of Gabor's is also fragile and messed up, besides still preserving a clingy dependence on the knife-thrower. So, it seems that what Gabor has to offer women is somehow life-affirming, and better than sex. And in fact, watching Gabor and Adèle at work, you cannot help thinking: who needs these two to literally have sex when all that knife-throwing is more suggestive of penetrative sex than a steamy Tinto Brass scene of your choice? In retrospect, I think this movie's main merit was to make me discover how charming and beautiful Johnny Depp's squeeze is - I had no idea. Sadly, Vanessa Paradis could not save the little movie from being just a nice-looking, superficially funny, substanceless piece of fluff, furthermore a hit-parade of French movie clichés that I thought would be beneath Leconte. Beineix's Betty Blue, Senta from Chabrol's silly La Demoiselle d'Honneur, Romane Bohringer's character in L'Appartement, even Jeanne Moreau as Catherine in Jules et Jim, and countless others: why are so many women in a certain category of French cinema invariably characterized as fragile and irrational, unsettlingly unpredictable and self-destructive, even suicidal? Yet, they are also intoxicatingly seductive and sexually voracious, fickle and capricious. They're the ultimate misogynist's sex fantasy, a woman that frightens (the vagina dentata myth being a symbolic exasperation of this fear of femininity) and enslaves the male (because sexual attraction is biologically inescapable). Paradis's Adèle was in fact a rather tone-down, sweetened version of one such stock female creation - in fact, perhaps a part of Leconte was distancing himself from this prototype and playing with it, though the other part of him was embracing it. But the fact that in the end Leconte shows us Gabor's fragility and Adèle's nascent strength goes some way towards showing that the director was also partly turning the stereotype on its head. The "Betty Blue" is what I call the female French movie prototype of the fragile-sexy-doomed heroine, which DOES certainly also exist in other cinematic traditions, though I seem to observe it more often in French movies. It's a fictional embodiment of womanhood that can be traced right back to the doomed "femme fatales" of the 19th century French artistic movement The Symbolists.The scenes of La Fille Sur le Pont that were set in Italy, Greece and Turkey were rather dubious in their astonishingly twee and simplistic stereotyping as well. They were the equivalent of accompanying any scene set in Paris with sappy accordion music and a view of the Eiffel tower in the background. Was Leconte trying to be "Fellinian" in that raffle scene in San Remo? Oh, puhleez! Give me Tandem, Ridicule or L'Homme du Train any day over this candy floss, Patrice.

writers_reign I saw this when it was released some five or six years ago and found it only so-so perhaps due to my aversion to Vanessa Paradis, a Goldie Hawn clone who seems to be under the misconception that acting is all about looking helpless and 'cute' and standing back as all the men within a hundred mile radius roll over and play dead. However the DVD is now available at a giveaway price so I watched it again and found more to admire. I have, of course, no problem with Patrice Leconte, indeed with some twelve titles he is the French director most represented in my DVD collection, similarly Daniel Auteuil is right behind Depardieu in the front rank of French actors currently working. So it was just a question of getting round Paradis which I found somewhat easier this time around. At the time (1999) Leconte had a penchant for using one actor twice in succession - Paradis appeared in his previous film Une Chance sur deux and Auteuil would appear in his next, La Veuve de St Pierre - so having just seen Paradis acted out of sight by Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo may have had something to do with it. The film is laced with wry, cynical lines and seems to be heading into Billy Wilder (The Apartment) territory except that the growing attachment between Auteuil and Paradis is largely on a subconscious level and even at the end it makes do without a conventional clinch. The idea of the obvious 'loser' - here Paradis - becoming stronger than the obvious 'stable/strong' one - Auteuil - is far from new, in fact SO far from new as to be formulaic so all that is left is to do it well and here all hands oblige. Leconte has one of the most eclectic ouevres of any director French or otherwise so it's ironic that he's chosen to come full circle inasmuch as his latest film - which opens in February -is a return to his roots; his second film was Les Bronzes and his latest Friends For Life or Les Bronzes Revisited. Meanwhile La Fille sur le pont is well worth a look.

stephenpaultaylor My ex-girlfriend suggested this movie. She actually gave me a copy. I had thought, previously, since she dug (or seemed to dig) Henry Fool (she later said that she must've been influenced by me, after having attempted to watch Surviving Desire and turning it off because it was too "talky") that perhaps the movie would at least be remotely intriguing. It wasn't.It was a definite case of style over substance. Clearly influenced by MTV (or in Canada's case, Much Music), it was chock full of interesting camerawork, beautiful cinematography, but the sentiments were bland and the story annoying and the characters unappealing. The story is about two incredibly needy, albeit unusual people (well, one is a knife thrower and the other is suicidal) who are tied at the hip and experience this "serendipity" and esp regarding each other. Several scenes show them walking aroung "talking" to each other (each one is in another part of the world). The movie is meant to show this tragic, romantic love affair full of magic and wonder and telepathy, but in the end, it's just a load of hogwash. The film suffers from overwrought sentimentality and a grating, unbelievable storyline that is all about the forces of fate etc.I was just really put off by the whole fairy tale, Cinderella aspect to the story, which seems to broadcast that people can't survive alone, and there is one person out there who is your soul mate. I realize that my own personal biases may influence this opinion, but so be it. I'm not a big fan of fate/ destiny/ the idea that our lives are pre-written. This film is a sickening lecture on the presence of serendipidy and fate and, in the end, I wanted to watch something real and gritty (Trainspotting or something). I mean, I don't mind flights of fancy etc., but this film was trollop. If you're a hopeless romantic who believes in needy, clingy relationships full of jealousy and mistrust, then you may enjoy this flick. If you have more of a philisophical bent and you believe in choice and free will and aren't usually pursuaded by layers of glossy style to conceal the fact that the film is a drab fairy tale, don't see this film. Go see Swimming Pool or 400 Blows if you want excellent french cinema. Avoid this at all costs.I give it 1 out of 10.