The Girl on the Bridge (La filles sur le pont)
Director: Patrice Leconte
Starring:Vanessa Paradis and Daniel Auteuil
The opening scene is Adele. Shot after shot: there is Adele with her big sorry eyes and the gap between her teeth and credits flashing in between. I knew then that The Girl on the Bridge was going to be a visual and an emotional hour and a half. The scene continues with Adele confessing her misfortune. Wrong choices, wrong turns, wrong roads taken.
“There’s no wrong road, only bad company.” That is what Gabor tells Adele after he has stopped her from jumping off a bridge. Then the movie takes off into a knife throwing frenzy around the world, with fear and passion being confused and a whole lot of luck.
Patrice Leconte directed this movie for movie connoisseurs. The lighting, the close-ups, the angles… it is all there in black and white. The two actors absorb the screen: living and breathing heaviness with such simple movements: Vanessa Paradis as the tragically light Adele, and Daniel Auteuil as the tragically dark Gabor. They are both so tragically perfect. The soundtrack could not be more right with the swinging Benny Goodman for feeling good and the haunting Marianne Faithful for feeling quietly emotional. No wonder the film was nominated as the Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes. It is a wonder, however, that it did not win.
I am not one of those females who feel degraded as a sex when I see beautiful young women fall for ugly older men in the movies. I know that anything is possible. I will, however, not deny that I have taken notice of it and laughed to myself. I did not need to laugh at all during The Girl on the Bridge, seeing a beautiful twenty year old girl with a ragged almost-fifty man. The delicacy with which the film is handled makes the romance between Adele and Gabor seem like the most natural thing in the world, not just the most natural thing in the movies.
The film, for me, was a visual feast complete with desire and anxiety and a touch of humor. It made me believe in love and it made me believe in luck. I still can’t stop talking about it.
Heather Johnson
