Girl on the Bridge movie review (2000)

Gabor complains that his eyes are failing him ("Past 40, knife-throwing becomes erratic"), but he is really very good, a skill revealed by the fact that this film is not a short subject. If he is good at knives, she is good at roulette, and in the casinos in the towns where they appear, she has an extraordinary run of good luck. His luck has turned good, too; they're making better money, finding better bookings, and they become so closely in sync they can even hear each other's thoughts.

"Girl on the Bridge" was directed by Patrice Leconte, a French filmmaker whose work includes "Monsieur Hire" (1989), "The Hairdresser's Husband" (1990) and "Ridicule" (1996). He is fascinated by the hoops that his characters will jump through in their search for sexual fulfillment. Monsieur Hire is a bald little man of solemn visage who is a voyeur. He meekly worships the woman in the apartment across the way, who is not oblivious to his attentions, but his haplessness is his undoing. "The Hairdresser's Husband," however, is about a man who became fixated in adolescence on hairdressers and wants to be present only while the woman of his dreams cuts hair. Now comes the knife-thrower.

Leconte's movies almost always involve a deep, droll humor (it is hard to see in "Monsieur Hire," but it is there). He's amused by human nature. His characters in "Girl on the Bridge" aren't oblivious to the humor in their situation; their love and luck seem to depend on earning their living by seeing how close they can come to disaster. Much of their appeal comes from the human qualities of the performers. Auteuil, he of the crooked nose and mournful countenance, is a man who can hardly believe good fortune, and Paradis is a woman who can see that during many of her orgasms the joke is on her.

The movie begins by taking an absurd situation rather seriously and then lets the seriousness melt away; by the time the lovers have voluntarily gotten themselves into a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, we are almost in Looney Tunes territory.

Leconte's own adolescent fixation seems to be with exotic Turkish harem music, which he gets around to with amazing frequency in his movies. In "The Hairdresser's Husband," so great was the husband's exuberance that he would sometimes put Turkish music on the phonograph and dance about the shop. In "Girl on the Bridge," the lovers work through the French and Italian Rivieras and then move on by sea to Istanbul--perhaps for no better reason than so Leconte can slip his favorite music onto the soundtrack.