Le pont des Arts (2004) User Reviews

No point in watching this movie if not as symbol

[druckerc · 8/10 · 7 February 2017]

This is one of the most richly symbolic movies I have watched in a while. In the absence of such content, the whole movie might be the series of hollow, grand quotes that some reviewers have recognized in it. This story is a tale of ascent that leaves behind soulless art and philosophy into a conversion of the soul to superior wisdom. The main characters never meet in the flesh. One is Sarah, a singer specialized in Baroque music who gives a superb rendition of the Lamento della ninfa de Monteverdi. The other is Pascal, a graduate school dropout who has given up finding the philosophical relevance of surrealist mastermind André Breton, to the disappointment of both his dissertation adviser and his girlfriend, who is an intense, committed pre- professional philosophy student. What unites this couple (if we may call them thusly) is the love for the Baroque period and the poetry of Michelangelo. In contrast, institutionalized artists and thinkers take a serious beating in this movie. They are either super-intellectualized, as Pascal's girlfriend, conceited as his adviser, or manipulative as the maestro and the famous actor. The plot is minimal. Sarah has a live-in boyfriend, Manuel, who adores her but cannot understand her feelings of disconnection from the daily bustle, and eventually jumps into the Seine from the Pont des arts. The former student breaks ties from academic philosophy and literature, and the personal relations with go with them, with the help of her rendition of The Nymph's Lament by Monteverdi. In the end, Sarah and Pascal have a talk on the very bridge from which she jumped. The final scene is the only possible form of reconciliation with reality, through the bridges that music and non- philistine art. Pascal comes to the verge of committing suicide as well, but manages to convert his refusal of philistinism into a "positive" quest for with the complicated, contradictory totality of the world, which was still accessible to Baroque humankind. Other pervading motifs are the bridge and music (which in fact are one and the same thing). Shortly before killing herself, Sarah dreams that she is trapped in the midst of a river, unable to find either banks. This brings to mind the Styx river, that guards the entry of Hades, in Monteverdi's Orpheus. Sarah feels trapped in the sense that, to her, the river does not unite two banks; it only banishes her to a non-place. In the end, she and Pascal learn, in case a dead person can learn anything, that music is a bridge that unites the whole. To her, the bridge between the banks of the Seine becomes a means of union. This is also stressed by Tenko, the traditional Japanese play that Pascal watches, about a magic drum that descends from heaven. Again, there is no point in watching this movie if not as symbol of the soul's journey to unite the many opposite "banks" of reality through music and philosophy. No wonder the Baroque is its most important historic reference, since this was the last period to take seriously this kind of Neo-Platonic speech. This was the last moment in European culture when smart and respectable people might still define music as a form of thinking about the invisible connections of the whole.

Beautiful film.

[moviesknight · 8/10 · 8 March 2022]

Starts a bit slow but then wonderful. Loved every bit of it, and the music is cherry on top. The story is good too, the realm.of reality and beyond. What we can comprehend or not. The end of life, some may say os due to failure but no success can have that effect too. It is the stillness that haunts life. Live in present.

The Real Star of the Film: "Lament of the Nymph"

[Monkeyfist251 · 31 January 2006]

A film that despite its complete unabashed intellectual minimalism has some surprisingly humorous and emotionally affecting moments. The film seems at first to be a Bresson inspired Antoine Doinele-esquire sojourn... but at a certain point of the film the real leading star of the picture emerges... in a recital for a new Baroque record... the film showcases an unbelievable transcendent and mournful version of Monteverdi's "Lamento Della Ninfa"... sung by one of the characters... the song is so arresting that it causes everyone who hears it to weep tears of malaise... and to your surprise as you sit in the half empty art house theater eyes half lids you start to feel your chest clench up... your eyes tear and before you know it the combination of the incredible recording by a group called "Le Poeme Harmonique" I believe... and the acute, mournful acting by Natacha Regnier punctuates an otherwise sparse film on an obscure subject with a great burst of emotion...

Having said this... I have been desperately trying to find the recording of "Lament of the Nymph" used in this film, but so far to no luck... it seems that "Le Poeme Harmonique" either has not recorded it for release... or else I'm looking in all the wrong places... I found a version by Cantus Colln but it pales in comparison to the version in the film...

Can anyone help me out? I'm am desperate to find this recording, and you will be too if you see the film...

An Ode by the Baroqueux

[draneassable · 10/10 · 6 February 2012]

Former New Yorker, Eugene Green's austerity conveys the intensity that motivates the revisionist/exploratory movement of early music which is accurately referred to as Baroqueux. It certainly helped explain to my puzzled wife why we seem to cry so much! This story, so emblematic, suggests how profoundly personal, resistant and even revolutionary this impulse is, and what historical/institutional factors it has encountered in our generation. Green is a vital theorist of baroque performance as well as a cinematographer. His loose caricature of the anglophones' most popular baroque luminary is truly hilariously. And, of course Vincent Dumestre's ensemble and Claire Lefilliâtre are always important!

Bridge of Sighs

[writers_reign · 24 October 2004]

Eugene Green has come up with a quirky unclassifiable entry here with elements of satire, black comedy and tragedy rubbing shoulders that fit where they touch. Denis Podalydes and Olivier Gourmet act everyone off the screen but they do have strong assistance from the script in which the latter is more Eyde Gorme than Olivier Gourmet and the former appears to be sending up Gilbert Adair. The limerick about the young man from Racine who invented a strange new machine (concave or convex, it would fit either sex/with attachments for those in between)was seldom more apropos than in Gourmet's take on Phaedra which has to be seen to be believed whilst Podalydes succeeds in creating an entirely new kind of faggot, light years away from Michel Serrault's Screaming Queen in La Cage aux folles. This is one of those plots in which tenuous links between disparate characters never quite mesh. Camille Carroz (Christine) is much too intense for boyfriend Adrien Micheaux and finally finds a soulmate in an equally intense (but thankfully unseen) student who is passionate about 12th century dietary conditions in Normandy. In the wake of their break-up Micheaux falls in love with the voice of Sarah (Natacha Regnier)a soloist on an album Christine had given him as a Christmas present. We, of course, have been following the traumas of Christine, who despite being in a solid-seeming relationship with Manuel (Alexis Loret)is vaguely unhappy and not just because of the cruel criticism of her singing at the hands of Podalydes. Although continuous the film is also episodic and punctuated by picture postcard views of Paris and Classical French film buffs will be delighted to catch a glimpse of the Hotel du Nord, albeit as it is today but still in the same location on the Canal St Martin. Quirky, uneven, but one that can definitely stand a second viewing in, say, six months or so. 7/10

Art as a means of spanning people and worlds...

[philosopherjack · 7 September 2019]

Eugene Green's Le pont des arts is indeed a film of bridges: of the real-life Parisian location of its title as a site of loss and redemption, of art as a means of spanning people and worlds, of the connective raw materal of cinema itself. The film contrasts a semi-established classical singer and a disaffected philosophy student: they never formally meet, but the beauty of the singer's art creates a bond which outlasts her personal tragedy and provides to the student a new direction and purpose (this is, no question, a misleadingly tidy synopsis). Green favours a restrained performance style and head-on, interrogative close-ups, a style which tends to emphasize the distance between people and the created nature of the narrative - when the two protagonists finally touch, the event is depicted only in shadow - but the joy in ideas, the belief in high culture as a source of transcendent beauty, are absolute (a sequence studying the audience's reaction at a Japanese No production, and a brief encounter with a Kurdish singer, make the point that such effects aren't confined to canonical Western glories, although the film seems more iffy about rock and roll). At the same time though, Green skewers the earthly pretensions which constantly get in the way: in particular, the singer's milieu is depicted as overrun by grotesquely self-regarding monsters who take pleasure in making tools out of people (the film, it should be said, is often very funny in this regard). In the end, it's both a seductive immersion in a certain type of cinematic tradition (one in which it seems meaningful that the student somewhat evokes Jean-Pierre Leaud) and an assertion of art - in that magical space where actors and acted-upon find communion - as an abiding zone of difference, one which Green's other, equally strange and scintillating, films confirm and extend.