A Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Language Film earlier this year, Girl on the Bridge is a terrific romantic tale about a young, suicidal woman and a knife-thrower in the midst of a mid-life crisis.  Sure, they’re not your typical screen couple, but what would you expect from a black-and-white French film about carnival act lovers?

Bridge opens with Adele (Vanessa Paradis) being interrogated by what appears to be a panel of doctors.  We learn that the wide-eyed waif, who has teeth like Alfred E. Newman, is 21 and dropped out of school early to run off with a boy.  Since then, Adele has been unlucky in all aspects of her life – especially love.  She even goes so far as to compare herself to flypaper picking up filth.  This great scene is comprised of just a few long shots of Adele, helping to establish her character better than a typical film’s opening scene.

The next scene shows Adele on a bridge over the Seine River in Paris. She’s about to jump into the cold, murky water below, when a stranger emerges from the shadows, calmly telling Adele that she shouldn’t off herself.  The stranger even offers her a job as his assistant.

The stranger turns out to be a piss-poor knife-thrower named Gabor (Daniel Auteuil, Lucie Aubrac).  He’s just turned 40 and is starting to worry that he’s lost his touch with his precious knives.  To make matters worse, Gabor is finding it increasingly difficult to get bookings at big tent festivals, losing out to novelty acts like contortionists and plate spinners.  But he sees something special in Adele and readily takes the chance at making her a part of his act.

Gabor and Adele’s first act involves knives being hurled at the shackled beauty with a curtain separating the two.  Gabor has never thrown blind before, but that’s the only way he can talk his way past the performance’s pessimistic booker.  It goes off well, with Adele finding some erotic pleasure from her fear of the oncoming knives.

The two hit the road, performing their sensational act around Europe. The catch is that Gabor has to heighten the risk of each performance to ensure a big payday.  He also has Adele visit various casinos, where the woman who used to be so unlucky begins to rake in piles of money at the roulette table.  The implication is that Gabor and Adele are unlucky apart but unstoppable as a team – a point driven home by a trick involving a dollar being torn in half and then, magically, becoming whole again.

You can see the instant where their luck takes a dramatic turn for the worse, at which point you hold your breath and wait for the inevitable tragedy to occur.  But it doesn't come the way you might expect it to.  In fact, it’s not even close.

While Paradis does an admirable job as Adele, Auteuil’s Gabor is the real draw here.  This has to be the coolest role in a French film since Alain Delon played Le Samouraï.  Auteuil looks like the love child of Midnight Run’s Robert DeNiro and Charles Grodin (I understand the scene where he is conceived is on the recently released DVD of Run).  He’s definitely not the most attractive guy (even for France), and his face barely shows any emotion, yet his performance is alluring and believable.

Bridge was directed by Patrice Leconte (Ridicule) and written by Serge Frydman.  Leconte’s direction, along with Jean-Marie Dreujou’s lush cinematography, make the film feel more dreamlike than any in recent memory.  The film was nominated for eight César Awards (the French version of the Oscars), nabbing nods for picture, director, screenplay and both lead acting roles (only Auteuil took home a trophy at a ceremony ironically hosted by Delon).  Although the subtitles are often difficult to read against the black-and-white pictures, Bridge plays like a fairy tale for grown-ups.

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