Leconte: La Fille Sur Le Pont (The Girl On The Bridge) (1999)

A glossy, haute couture pastiche of poetic realism and neorealism, The Girl On The Bridge revolves around the romance between Adele (Vanessa Paradis), a drifting, melancholy waif, and Gabor (Daniel Auteil), a knife-thrower who saves her from jumping off a bridge, and convinces her to become part of his act. Most of the film follows their personal and professional relationship – there aren’t really any other characters - but that doesn’t necessarily make it feel insular, it just means that Leconte has to work extra hard to make them feel like they’re carrying the whole world in their wake. Not unlike some of the greatest poetic realist films, there’s a sense that everything accelerates towards some unimaginable departure, a departure without a destination, as Leconte draws on Adele’s plunge to the depths and Gabor’s knife-lines to craft long, low corridors and tunnels of space, occasionally funnelling the action along the vortices of Jeneut, Besson and Carax’s futuristic Paris. As with the whole Cinema du Look movement, too, there’s a sense that the future itself is a new kind of sexual orientation, or sensual orientation, where knife-throwing isn’t just some cipher or placeholder for sex, but a new and fascinating development of sex. Specifically, it’s a form of sex that allows men to finally achieve multiple orgasms, as Gabor explains to Adele that the real challenge of knife-throwing is to transmit and receive thoughts faster than the knife, over and over and over again. Too bound up in the shared telepathy of orgasm to even need sex any more, Adele and Gabor come to have the same strange relation to each other that you sense between models in a fashion spread, especially a French fashion spread – flushed with cyborg warmth, they’ve become post-human, even if a critical part of being post-human involves mistaking themselves for human, believing more in their humanity than any of the actual humans filling out the background of this sly, surreal mood piece.