Destruction, a runaway budget and a monumental set nobody noticed: ‘Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’, the classic film that almost wasn’t made

If Les Amants du Pont-Neuf had never finished shooting, as seemed destined to happen, it would be a legend today. Documentaries about the great frustrated work would have been released, books would have been written, and cinephiles would have built it in their minds with the precision that every shared fantasy eventually acquires. But of the many incredible things surrounding this movie, the most incredible one of all is its very existence, which was threatened during the nearly three years of a halting shoot. Even its authenticity is an exquisitely expensive illusion: what was meant to be a low-budget art-house film ended up as a massive-budget art-house film.

In 1984 a 24-year-old named Leos Carax — actually Alexandre Dupont; his stage name is an anagram of his given name, Alex, with Oscar added — burst onto the scene with his first feature, Boy meets girl, a black-and-white film that merged Nouvelle Vague style with French poetic realism. Two years later he released Mauvais sang (Bad Blood), a fable about love in the time of AIDS indebted to 1960s Godard that achieved an unexpected box-office success in France. Its lead was Juliette Binoche, fresh from her breakthrough in André Téchiné’s Rendez-vous, for which critics had compared her to silent-screen star Louise Brooks. Binoche and Carax, the new darlings of French cinema, began a romantic relationship and also decided to embark on new professional ventures together.

By 1988 Binoche had already starred in Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an adaptation of Milan Kundera’s bestselling novel that was nominated for two Oscars, and she was emerging as a major young European star. The film she was to make with her partner was meant to be a brief pause from the international career that lay ahead. On a flight from Los Angeles to Paris they read the script for Les Amants du Pont-Neuf, at that point conceived as a small romantic comedy about two misfits who survive and fall in love on the streets of Paris, with celebrations for the bicentennial of the French Revolution as a backdrop. The Pont-Neuf, the oldest bridge spanning the Seine, functioned as a third character and was therefore indispensable to the story. Otherwise, the director wanted to strip away anything superfluous: to make up for the heavy production of Mauvais sang, he imagined a modest work shot on Super-8 in that single setting.

However, it soon became clear that was an impossible aim. He was not allowed to close the Pont-Neuf for the three months planned for filming, so they decided to split it in two: daytime scenes would be shot first on the bridge and nighttime scenes moved to sets. Production designer Michel Vandestien was hired to recreate the area around Paris’ Île de la Cité with ingenious trompe-l’œil. As he later recounted in the film’s making-of, he sketched a design on beer cartons in a bar in front of Carax. “How much will it cost?” Carax asked. “I don’t know, eight or nine million francs,” Vandestien replied cautiously. “Then let’s do it.” Suddenly the budget jumped to 32 million francs (roughly $5.6 million at the time and nearly $11.4 million at today’s value), a respectable sum for an independent film.

After exploring cheaper options — building the sets in Spain, Yugoslavia or North Africa — they chose Lansargues, a village of about 2,000 in the marshy Petite Camargue region near Montpellier. A large artificial lake would stand in for the Seine, and a replica of the Pont-Neuf began to rise above it. Meanwhile they obtained permission to shoot the other portion on the real bridge for 18 non-extendable days between late July and mid-August 1988. The first clapboard fell there. But barely had production begun than it had to stop: the male lead, Denis Lavant — a former circus performer who had also starred in Carax’s previous two features — suffered an accident while trying to repair a shoe sole and cut a tendon in his thumb. Insurers proposed recasting, but the director refused. Changing the Paris shoot dates was impossible because they depended on the monument’s permit. The solution everyone agreed on presented itself: since they had a replica, they would use it for the whole film. It only needed upgrading to handle natural-light scenes — at a new cost.

Then the production company finally collapsed, and construction on the sets ceased with less than 20 minutes of usable footage shot but almost the entire original estimated budget already spent. Everything pointed to Les Amants du Pont-Neuf becoming another never-made legend, like Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune or Josef von Sternberg’s I, Claudius.

In 1989 the Swiss real-estate multimillionaire Francis Van Buren came to the rescue, enthused by the project and promising to inject another 30 million francs, which he was told would be necessary to finish the sets and complete production. That summer the machinery started again, but after a month it became clear that twice that amount would be needed, and Van Buren backed out. To make matters worse, apocalyptic storms in the autumn partially destroyed the set. Cancellation again loomed. Then another tycoon, this one more familiar with the film industry, stepped in: Christian Fechner, a former magician and ventriloquist and the financier of Louis de Funès’s 1970s comedies, agreed to put up the 70 million francs required. He had been convinced the film should go ahead during a visit to the sets guided by Carax himself. Indeed, filming resumed in August 1990 and proceeded without further interruption.

By then it was no longer a romantic comedy but a melodrama about impossible love between an artist losing her sight to a degenerative disease and a vagabond who survives by petty street theft. Two endings were conceived: a tragic one in which Juliette Binoche’s character dies, and a more optimistic one with the lovers embraced on the prow of a barge, a sequence that would later seem to foreshadow the most famous scene in Titanic, released six years later. Binoche prevailed, and the latter ending was kept. They also filmed dance sequences lit by July 14 fireworks to music by Iggy Pop, Public Enemy and Johann Strauss, water-skiing on the Seine, and even a snowfall simulated with white fabric and endless kilograms of salt scattered across the set.

At 10 hectares, it was the largest set ever built for French cinema to that date. It included the entire Pont-Neuf over an artificial lake, but also the famous equestrian statue of King Henry IV, the Seine quays, Métro entrances, building façades and even the art-déco lines of the grand department store La Samaritaine. There were about 2,500 light bulbs, some mimicking the flickering reflection of city lights on the river. There were also fake cars that no one drove, running on rails. It was an immense artifice that looked entirely real on screen. When a producer invests a large sum in a movie, he usually expects each dollar to show on screen, obscenely if necessary. But Les Amants du Pont-Neuf’s exorbitant budget barely shows, precisely because the artifice serves environmental realism, and it seems inconceivable that it was not shot in central Paris but on a stage built over a pond more than 600 kilometers away. There is something beautiful in the fact that the producer was seduced not by the spectacle his millions would buy, but by the promise embodied in that set under construction.

“It’s the craziest film I’ve ever made,” Juliette Binoche would say decades later. She perhaps was thinking about the sacrifices it demanded: her meteoric career was frozen for two and a half years. She had to turn down several high-profile projects, including the third Indiana Jones film (the first of three refusals to Steven Spielberg), Cyrano de Bergerac (one of French cinema’s biggest hits) and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s The Double Life of Veronique, in which she was replaced by Irène Jacob, who won the Best Actress prize at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival for that role. In 1993 Binoche and Kieślowski made up for it working together on Three Colors: Blue, for which she won the Volpi Cup in Venice. All of that was possible because of her absolute faith in Les Amants du Pont-Neuf. “I always knew it would be made. Always,” she said in the official making-of.

The same did not hold for Binoche’s relationship with Carax, which did not survive the pressures of production. She began another relationship with André Hallé, a diver who worked on the film’s production, with whom she had her son Raphaël. Ironically, during the shooting of an underwater scene in a pool, Binoche nearly drowned. After that extreme experience she decided thereafter to “always choose life, no matter what,” she confessed in an interview with The Guardian.

Needless to say, the October 1991 theatrical release did not even remotely recoup the multiple producers’ investment, which various estimates put between 100 and 160 million francs at the time (roughly $34.2 to $57 million in today’s dollars). Critically, however, the film was mostly well received, though opinions were divided. Cahiers du Cinéma devoted a special issue to it. In Le Monde, esteemed critic Danièle Heymann described it as “a film like no other” and added: “The film won a long time ago; Carax won a long time ago; cinema won a long time ago. We have long been deeply moved and enduringly amazed.” That view was not shared by Jacques Zimmer, who in Télérama called Carax “neurotic” and “narcissistic.” Filmmakers such as Scorsese, Coppola, Sean Baker, Harmony Korine and Claire Denis have expressed admiration for the film and its director. In 2010 Gérard Depardieu, in controversial remarks attacking Juliette Binoche, took the opportunity to call Les Amants du Pont-Neuf a “piece of shit,” without providing details to support his claim.

Carax himself spent almost a decade without directing: he returned in 1999 with what is almost unanimously considered his worst work, Pola X, which was savaged by critics at the Cannes Film Festival. That was followed by an even longer hiatus (aside from some music videos and his contribution to the collective film Tokyo!) until 2012’s mysterious and poetic Holy Motors, also in part set near the Pont-Neuf (La Samaritaine plays a key role), which was greeted with widespread enthusiasm. His next feature, the beautiful musical Annette (2021), one of whose stars was a puppet, received mixed reviews. His upcoming project for 2028 is expected to be Lily May B, a postapocalyptic tale starring Jenna Ortega. For now, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf remains his most conventional work — after all, it is a straightforward story about two lovers in desperate circumstances — and at the same time his most eccentric. The cliché of cinema’s “magic” is overused, but there are a few cases, this being one, where the term is more than justified: an impossible film that nonetheless appeared before our eyes, without trickery or pretense.

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