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Léos Carax Presents a Special Screening of LES AMANTS DU PONT-NEUF at the 22nd FICM

Gustavo R. Gallardo

Les Amants du Pont-Neuf had a special screening at the 22nd Morelia International Film Festival (FICM), with the presence of its director, Léos Carax, who also answered questions from the audience.

“I was in my twenties in the 1980s and made three films with the same actor, the same crew, the same producer. I was a young man and I was discovering cinema and love at the same time,” he commented on the idea of making this film, which he eventually discovered was part of a trilogy.

Carax's trilogy includes Boy Meets Girl (1984), Mauvais Sang ( 1986) and Les Amants du Pont-Neuf (1991).

With the oldest bridge in Paris as a backdrop, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf tells a love story between two drifters: Alex, an aspiring circus performer, and Michèle, a painter driven to live on the streets because of an illness that is making her blind.

What to the audience might seem like a carefully plotted story, to the director is a film that had no conventional script. “I admire people who really know what they're doing, both in film and in painting, but I can't be like that; as I said a while ago, I start with chaos,” Carax explained.

“I start with a few images, a few emotions, and then I start making a score out of all that,” he added.

Hours earlier, after presenting a special screening of C'est pas moi, the filmmaker mentioned that he no longer watches complete films, but only fragments. Asked about this habit, he replied: “I watch bits and pieces of films, I like to see new faces... Sometimes I watch a whole film or two, especially with my daughter."