The Girl on the Bridge (2000) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

If you understand the references, you probably think that's a strange recipe, a bit like mixing mussels in white wine sauce with a chicken fried steak, and you'd be right. It's that kind of film. Where else but France could a major box office smash be a symbol-laden B&W adult fairy tale?

Vanessa Paradis, aka Mrs Depp, plays a despondent woman who is hanging out on a bridge in Paris, waiting to jump. Daniel Auteuil is a professional knife-thrower who trolls the bridges looking for just such women to use as his targets. What can he offer them? Well, maybe they'll enjoy the ride and he'll keep missing. But if he doesn't miss, what do they have to lose? They were going to commit suicide anyway.

Can't argue with that.

They part briefly, and luck frowns on them both, but all the while they continue to communicate telepathically and we just know that they'll find the right bridge and meet again.

This movie is so impressive in so many ways that you'll probably be tempted to overlook the fact that it really is just a Gallic retelling of Pretty Woman with more imagination. The photography is spectacular, and its energy level is very high. Unlike arty European films with the languorous and endless single camera set-ups, this film is about high voltage and quick cuts. One of the cuts is a roller-coaster, and this seems to serve little purpose in the film other than more heavy-handed symbolism about trying to hang on through life's descents, but it serves as an apt metaphor for the film itself, which features quick mood shifts and rapid pacing. Autueil reminds me of my all-time favorite actor, James Cagney. Average looking guy, maybe even a touch on the ugly side, but with a special presence. Like Cagney, he talks too fast, walks too fast, smokes too fast, moves his hands too fast, and still manages to pull it all off without seeming artificial, as if he were simply a wave sweeping you along and making you travel at his speed or get dumped.

In addition to the blatant symbolism mentioned above, the director also gets into the whole Fellini image thing, and he rarely passes on the chance to show the couple's fellow itinerant vaudevillians - painted clowns, sideshow performers, elephants, contortionists, you name it. 

Some of the motion shots are impressive. The bridge of the title is photographed at one time from a speedboat passing underneath, a vertiginous and interesting shot made far more dramatic by the fact that it's in black and white at night, so it features light filling up a dark screen, then receding. The shot is repeated in the final scene, but with some major changes. This time it is daylight, the lighting is romantic, they are in love, and the boat is moving more slowly. My favorite shot in the film involves Autueil playing on the railroad tracks in front of a speeding train as it debouches from a tunnel. We don't realize until the critical moment that he is actually just barely beyond the point where the train switches off in another direction. Impressive, and imaginative.

The dialogue is also very clever, very existential and Euro-hip.

Is it a masterpiece? I don't know. I was impressed by it, as you can tell from what I've written, but you know what? After Paradis left Autueil and the cruise ship with her then-lover, my mind wandered. I had been so involved, and then the film just lost me. I started to think about something else, and read a couple things while the movie played, and couldn't stay focused on the film until the main couple reunited. Even at an economical 92 minutes, the film lost me briefly. 

Well, you should be able to determine whether you would like it. Some of you are never going to sit through a sub-titled B&W fairy tale film with so many Felliniesque touches. Some of you will find it so original, so inventive, that you'll be fascinated and mesmerized by it. You have to figure out where to pitch your camp.