The Lovers on the Bridge

The most notorious production in modern French cinema. Leos Carax began shooting on the actual Pont-Neuf in 1988, lost his location, and had a full-scale replica of the bridge and its surroundings built in a reservoir near Montpellier; the budget went from around 32 million francs to over 160 million and the film took three years to finish. It nearly ended his career and is now regarded as his masterpiece.

Denis Lavant plays Alex, a fire-breather living rough on the closed bridge, and Juliette Binoche plays Michèle, an artist losing her sight who joins him there. Jean-Yves Escoffier shot it, and the film alternates between grimy handheld documentary of homelessness and set-pieces of enormous scale — most famously the bicentenary fireworks sequence, in which the two of them dance along the parapet while the sky goes off above the Seine.

It flopped in France, was barely released elsewhere for years, and has since accumulated 4.22 on Letterboxd from 65,000 ratings. Carax's Holy Motors and Annette are already in the catalogue; this is the film they both descend from, and the fullest account of what he does when the money is there and the discipline is not.