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France 1998
Reviewed by Ginette Vincendeau
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
France, the present. Young Adèle is interrogated by a psychologist, seemingly while in jail. She confesses to a string of sexual encounters and continuing bad luck. She is next found on a bridge in Paris, about to jump. Knife-thrower Gabor rescues her and offers her a job as a human target. In Monte Carlo, he changes her hairstyle and wardrobe. Their dangerous act (he throws knives blindfolded at Adèle) is popular and their relationship grows affectionate, although Adèle keeps having sex with other men. Gabor declares they are in luck as long as they stay together.
They win money in the casino and go to San Remo where they win a car in a lottery. They drive at night without lights and crash in a field. On a cruise ship, where Gabor throws knives while Adèle spins on the wheel of death, they meet newly married Takis and his bride. Adèle runs away with Takis. Gabor uses the bride as target but wounds her and loses his job. Meanwhile Takis' boat breaks down. He abandons Adèle, who ends up broke in Athens. Gabor turns up in Istanbul equally destitute. She finds him as he is about to jump into the Bosporus. They walk away together.
Popular French cinema usually comes to the UK in two guises: action thrillers, such as Luc Besson's, or heritage films, of which director Patrice Leconte's Ridicule is a good example. La Fille sur le pont is another kind of movie altogether, what one might call a 'popular auteur' French film. Made by a prominent director (Leconte) to a high standard of craftsmanship, featuring an ambitious contemporary script, it's nonetheless aimed at a mainstream audience. Leconte (who last November lead a controversial battle against French film critics for their alleged bias against French cinema) is now in the same class of renown as Bertrand Blier, Bertrand Tavernier and Coline Serreau, among others. However, La Fille sur le pont fizzled at the box office in France, despite its three-star - Leconte, Daniel Auteuil, Vanessa Paradis - status, humour and upbeat happy ending.
There's much to savour here: shot beautifully in black and white, the film features marvellous widescreen camerawork and excellent turns from Paradis and Auteuil. But these achievements, together with flamboyant dialogue à la Blier and pointed New Wave references (the Les Quatre Cent Coups-like interview with protagonist Adèle at the beginning, the La Baie des anges-style picture of the Côte d'Azur) cannot compensate for the script's flimsiness. Granted, as the film keeps telling us, we are watching a fairy tale: "I'm [her] good fairy," says knife-thrower Gabor of Adèle to a young man on the train; Adèle and Gabor act as good-luck charms to each other; significant objects mysteriously appear at key moments. But this tale of mutual salvation is strangely old-fashioned, despite Adèle's slangy lines and casual promiscuity. The view of the circus follows age-old cinematic clichés: circus people are basically sad, their acts disasters waiting to happen.
La Fille sur le pont lacks novelty in another, more interesting way: it uncannily fits the recurrent French father-daughter theme, now starting to look a little dog-eared. As in some of Brigitte Bardot's 50s films or those in the 80s and 90s with Charlotte Gainsbourg, Marie Gillain and indeed Vanessa Paradis, a world-weary middle-aged male enacts the fantasy of saving/loving a delinquent daughter-figure, an erotic rescue fantasy mixed with the Pygmalion myth. "I want to turn you into Cinderella," says Gabor before giving Adèle a make-over in Monte Carlo. Typically, the young woman is motherless while her father is played by a big star - here it's Auteuil, while Gérard Depardieu played Paradis' father in Elisa. Even more strikingly, in Leconte's Une chance sur deux she had two fathers, played by Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Equally characteristic of this father-daughter sub-genre is the way the younger men are ineffectual and quickly marginalised despite their sexual usefulness, while the relationship between ageing male and young woman is sexually sublimated. In this case though, the knife-throwing metaphor turns both farcical and nasty, as Paradis passively waits to be wounded. Just in case we hadn't figured it out, the sexual metaphor is underlined by Paradis noting that it invokes "fear and pleasure at the same time" in her. As in other examples of this genre, misogyny is cleverly occluded by the beauty of the images and the male lead's accomplished acting. We even end up feeling sorry for Gabor when he can't throw his knives any more. Auteuil's ability to evoke winsome vulnerability almost makes us forget the symmetry of his and Adèle's fate is illusory: in their particular game, he risks losing his job but she risks losing her life.