My Own Private Lavant

Too much of a good thing. I thought I'd round out my Denis Lavant festival (see previous post) with a viewing of Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. I want to like it. I admire the excess. If you're going to reinvent melodrama, I'd rather it be this than Todd Haynes: not Haynes' careful, pained dialog ("it must be terrible to be a black man"--that's Tisa's friend Naima's summary of the dialog in Far From Heaven), not the exacting 1950s palette; not the ironic re-stagings. Carax is blood and fire and gratuitous narrative acts. --And I like the ending, which rewrites L'Atalante. (Or, I like that I'm able to congratulate myself for noticing its relation to L'Atalante. Cineaste that I am. The ending itself is actually another gratuitous narrative act.)

Lavant's kineticism is put through its paces in Lovers on the Bridge: he's given a cast and a crutch; he hobbles and clambers and runs peg-leggedly; he drinks and shivers and passes out; he breathes fire, he does handstands; but the film is oddly inert for all Lavant's motion.

(Speaking of melodrama: I'm also watching Fassbinder lately. Fassbinder's melodrama is much better than Haynes's. Especially if you count the marriage films, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Effi Briest, the Station Master's Wife.--My other favorite actor of late is Fassbinder himself, in his segment of the omnibus film Germany in Autumn.)