The Lovers On The Bridge

By RICHARD CORLISS

Juliette Binoche has one of the world's magnificent faces--delicate, intelligent, grave, questing--and this 1991 romance (just released in the States) is the most lustrous showcase for her haggard purity. The plot groans with lower-depths anomie: Michele, a painter who is half blind, camps out on Paris' Pont-Neuf with Alex, a fire eater who is more than half mad. But Carax vitalizes the film with images that sparkle, smolder, catch fire; he might be offering Michele a last visual banquet before her eyes close forever. Binoche's beauty is, naturally, the main course. One watches her ferocity, the hard-won smile and moist eyes, with studious rapture.

--R.C.