The Lovers on the Bridge

A fiery, all-consuming love story unfolds against the backdrop of a Parisian bridge, where two lost souls—homeless drifter Alex (Denis Lavant) and Michèle (Juliette Binoche), who is slowly losing her sight—find refuge. Leos Carax paints their passion in extravagant, almost operatic frames, blending raw realism with dreamlike poetry. His virtuosic direction and exuberant staging lend the film an apocalyptic intensity while also making it an intimate declaration of love. This is cinema that erupts with emotion and defies limits—both narrative and financial. Lovers on the Bridge remains infamous as one of the most expensive and ill-fated productions in French history, with its budget spiraling between 100 and 200 million francs (the exact figure remains unknown). Repeated delays and setbacks plagued the shoot, and as Carax later admitted, at one point he lost all hope of ever finishing the film.

Mikołaj Mizak

Léos Carax was born in 1960 in the Suresnes suburbs of Paris as Alexandre Oscar Dupont. His professional name, Léos Carax, is an anagram of his first and middle names, ‘Alex Oscar’. At barely 20 years of age, he worked as a film critic for ‘Cahiers du Cinéma’, the magazine edited by Serge Daney, where Carax published his first article – an enthusiastic review of Sylvester Stallone’s directorial debut  Paradise Alley (1978). Only a few years later, Carax began filming his directorial debut,  Boy Meets Girl, which generated significant buzz at the Cannes Film Festival and already displayed characteristic elements of his directorial style: a love for silver screen poetics, a melancholy sensitivity and an ironic sense of humor. His sophomore effort,  The Night Is Young (1986) received an award for innovation at the Berlin Film Festival, followed by The Lovers on the Bridge, a financial flop that nonetheless received an award from the European Film Academy. After an eight-year hiatus, Carax returned with the full-length feature  Pola X, a loose adaptation of a Herman Melville novel (he made only one short film in the meantime entitled  Sans titre). One of his later shorts introduced the character of Monsieur Merde, who would return several years later in the Carax film  Holy Motors. Holy Motors was the hit of the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, catapulting its director into the pantheon of leading contemporary filmmakers.

Catalog MFF Nowe Horyzonty 21. edition