Voulez-vous jeter des couteaux avec moi ce soir?

Director Patrice Leconte's film Girl on the Bridge (La Fille sur le Pont) opens with crashing Turkish music set against the self-conscious, perhaps apprehensive stare of a young woman (Vanessa Paradis). She is beautiful in a very French way: big-eyed, fresh-faced, slender, pouty. We learn from an unseen interviewer that her name is Adele; she is 22. Pressed by the rather clinical interviewer, she talks about her short and checkered past, which has already led her to consider herself doomed to lifelong failure. Adele hesitates as she describes how she imagines her life in the future: like a bus depot or train station where she sits anonymously and waits. "For what?" the interviewer asks. She struggles. "For something to happen to me."

Well, knife-throwing is about to happen to Adele. Once she's decided that nothing will ever happen to her, she gets ready to jump off a bridge. In steps Gabor (Daniel Auteuil), a middle-aged knife-thrower who claims to cruise bridges for targets because suicidal women already think they've got nothing else to lose. "Past the age of 40, knife-throwing becomes erratic. That's why I recruit on bridges...I like to help out." Adele takes Gabor for a dirty old man who is losing his sexual potency along with the steadiness of his hand, but he denies the insinuation: "I never sleep with my targets!" It must be fate.

Courtesy Paramount Classics Darling, I have an urge...to throw large steak knives at you...

Gabor inducts Adele into the carnivalesque world of novelty shows, traveling from resort hotels to Italian country fairs to a cruise ship; the film's stark, monochromatic photography, full of inky blacks and brilliant whites, renders palatably fresh such clichés as dizzying pans through crowds of midgets, contortionists, and fire-blowers. The soundtrack uses hot jazz to accentuate Adele's increasing sense of wonder at this new world. Although some of the choices, such as "Sing, Sing, Sing," are trite, they work, especially during the punchy, montage-filled scenes in which Gabor—telepathically—coaches Adele at roulette and thus convinces her of her ability to be lucky.

Until this point, we have wondered what Adele finds compelling enough about Gabor to let him throw knives at her. But after her suicide attempt, she begins to realize that her life is in Gabor's hands—those hands capable of making an errant throw. Auteuil, with his sad eyes and doughy jowls, looks so dumpy that his ill-fitting outfits resemble children's pajamas rather than glamour suits; soon, we begin to suspect that the knife-thrower is neither as renowned as he claims, nor always as lucky. Rather, his recognition of Adele's "gift" seems to have given him newfound confidence. Each is dependent on the other—Adele says that Gabor and she are like "two halves of a 50-dollar bill"—and it becomes clear that, though each is a basket case alone, together they are brilliant.

Film

Girl on the Bridge Directed by Patrice Leconte Starring: Daniel Auteuil, Vanessa Paradis York Square Cinema

The intimacy and tension between Gabor and Adele are played out in the knife-throwing scenes. Once again, Jean-Marie Dreujou's camera makes gorgeous what could otherwise be an uninspired, even prurient clunker of an analogy. The camera makes fast cuts between Gabor's riveted, glossy stare of concentration, his glinting weaponry, and Adele's silky writhing. Their stage performances are charged (onlookers, amusingly, grow hot and bothered), and their private knife show in an empty barn is performed with all the desperation and haste of lovers with no place to go. The only thing interfering with the heat of this scene is the soundtrack, which unfortunately features vocals by Marianne Faithfull, who at least manages to resemble a French chanteuse. If you liked Faithfull's triumphant return to recording, you may enjoy this more than I did, but if you don't care much about her, it just seems bizarre.

Paradis and Auteuil make a compelling duo, so much so that despite Adele's frequent lapses in judgment and their collective hard luck, you know—or want to know—that these two people must be together. Sex doesn't seem to be what binds them. Gabor's early claim about his targets holds true throughout the film, the two address each other throughout using the formal pronoun vous, and the most physical contact they exchange is a passionate hug. If anything, the frank eroticism of their act seems to be a metaphor for a deeper, more tortured love that extends far beyond this film's breathless 90 minutes.

The fact that we never see Adele and Gabor launch into a romance falls in line with the rest of the film's refusal to be clichéd. Girl on the Bridge continually makes use of seemingly tired, simplistic devices and themes, among them the question of where fate and love intersect, but spins them beguilingly anew.

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