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.
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