There are moments and scenes in Lovers on the Bridge that waver between being straightforward in their realism and the given grittiness of living life on the streets homeless and of those sudden romantic bursts that are also a given if you're French and wanting to show how wonderful and horrible it can be in a strange situation. There are many I could point to, but there's also a suddenness to the work, moments that pop out and make the viewer put into perspective the tragic nature of this story and the characters. There's an unpredictability, but not without logic or something in line with life in this situation and place.

One such moment that few reviewers may talk about involves the character of Hans and his death. Throughout the film he's been more than wary of the presence of half-blind Michelle (Binoche) who has also fallen in (possible) love with Alex (Lavant) the drunken/druggie fire-breather, and for a while we as the audience see him as a rather ugly being. But then he opens up to Michelle- how he came to be on this bridge without a job, or without his wife and the death of his child- and he offers her to take her to a museum, which he has a key for from his job as a guard, to see a painting as close to the surface as possible late at night. He's actually quite a touching character gradually, still grumpy and grisly but with a conscience and feeling for Michelle's plight... Then as he walks down a set of stairs and comes to the side of the riverbank he slips and falls and dies.

In any other hands this could become high melodrama, a director pulling out all the stops to make this a really significant event for these character Michelle and Alex. But just as soon as he was there, he's gone, and I was overwhelmed for a moment by pure anguish at this man's demise. There's other moments like that as well in Carax's film, where he substitutes stark poetry- or something truly alive and fast and ebullient poetry with his camera and wonderful, expensive set (some of the time)- and balances so satisfyingly between the grime and clutter of this little enclave on the bridge and the torrid love between two people who are together for various reasons, some known well and some intimated by just the slightest moves (or lack thereof). With some minor exceptions like the very end, which leads to some curious and surreal ambiguity, it's a sensational ride.

We're taken along on the story of Alex, a fire-breather as his only trade and with hobbies of booze and drugs in order to sleep, and Michelle, a painter who has nowhere to go except to old lovers she'd rather not see, or can't see because of flailing eyesight (or, if she does, bad things happen- or appear to happen, again the ambiguity). They become very close, maybe too close for the extremely lonely and possibly brain damaged Alex, and pull off a money making scheme, which ends with a moment of a selfish act, as well as have nights of debauchery and excitement. The most notable of the latter, probably of the best kinds of exuberant, crazy type scenes in any motion picture, is when Alex and Michelle, smashed to hell, run and jump and dance to a giant fireworks display, with Carax pumping up Iggy Pop and Blue Danube Waltz music, and finishing off with a water-skiing down the river. This is one of those sequences I probably will never forget, not just for the power of the film-making but for the feeling one has for the characters at that moment of time in the movie: sublime, momentary escapism.

Things end up getting very dark for the characters, not least of which for Alex who goes on a rampage tearing down posters looking for Michelle for an eye-operation (this is one of those scenes that goes between reality and fantasy that's jarring: it verges on pretension, but I actually didn't mind it for how wrapped up one becomes in the plight of Alex with "his" Michelle),and the ending finds the two years later, changed only on the surface. All the old wounds are there, and how they'll exactly end up is difficult to say. But what is clear for Carax, after going through a story that features real homeless people in shelters (this footage shot like a documentary, plunging us so far into this world we forget most of the time the bridge is a set),of numerous fights and cries and hugs and laughs and fights between the two would-be/may-be lovebirds, that what would be cynical in any other hands is treated as bittersweet humanism. Carax cares for these characters deeply, even the troubled Alex, and it's important to understand that in their downfall. A+

Alex, a young homeless man, is seen as the film begins walking in a drug induced state in the middle of an avenue in Paris; it's a miracle he is not killed!. When he falls, a car almost goes over him, resulting in an ankle fracture. Alex finds Michele, another homeless woman, sleeping in his spot when he returns to the oldest bride in Paris, Pont Neuf, which is being repaired.

Thus, the bridge acts as a refuge for Alex, and Hans, another poor man who has given up on life, or so it seems. Hans supplies Alex with drugs, and the new arrival is a threat, as far as he can see. Alex is taken with the mysterious Michele, who has an eye patch and appears to be losing her vision, something we are never told what caused it.

Michele is a girl that comes from privilege, judging by a letter Alex finds. It's clear to see the hold the young woman has on the homeless man, and he falls head over heels with her. The happiness, alas, is short lived. Alex has discovered a poster in the metro asking about Michele's whereabouts. In it, a pending operation that will save her eye is mentioned. Alex, who doesn't want to lose her, starts a series of fires that has a tragic consequence.

Suffice it to say that the two lovers are reunited after they both seem to have dealt with their problems and we watch them sailing the Seine toward what appears will be a happier life.

Leos Carax got excellent performances out of the two leads. Juliette Binoche makes an enigmatic Michele and Dennis Lavant is convincing as Alex. Klaus Michael Gruber is seen as Hans.

The film could have improved with badly needed editing. Jean Yves Escoffier, the cinematographer captures the magnificent fireworks from the celebration of Bastille Day in Paris. The music by David Bowie, Dimitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten is heard in the background.

Being basically the story of a romance among tramps, this sentimental and drawn-out melodrama is filled with repellent detail (these characters certainly don't emanate from the world of Chaplin or Rene' Clair!) but is held firmly enough together by good performances by the three main actors (particularly Juliette Binoche, who is quite moving as the sketch artist slowly going blind) and the odd moment of inspiration: the lovers walking on the ledge of the bridge against the backdrop of a fireworks display; their putting to sleep the clientele of a café by means of the narcotic previously used by the insomniac boy; the elderly tramp – a sort of father-figure to the boy but who also has an inexplicable aversion to the girl – reminiscing about his manic-depressive wife and the former job he had as the watchman of various cultural sites; the lovers running naked by the sea silhouetted against the horizon (and with the boy's erect penis receiving undue attention!); the boy setting on fire a bunch of posters of the missing girl fixed on the walls of an underground station.