The Girl on the Bridge

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

He (Daniel Auteuil) is a carnival knife thrower down on his luck. She (Vanessa Paradis, a.k.a. Mrs. Johnny Depp) is a waif who has permitted too many penetrations of a seemingly less lethal sort. And here they are, strangers on a bridge, contemplating suicide. She takes the plunge. He rescues her. Miraculously, their luck changes. And then, not so miraculously, changes again. This is a tangy frappe of a movie--preposterously comic, deliriously romantic, outrageously stylish in black-and-white. But in its cockeyed way it has some interesting things to say about the waywardness of chance and, in one weird passage, the sexuality of contortionists.

--By Richard Schickel