Alternate Endings are companion pieces to previously written reviews on A Room With No View. They are disagreement, alternative perspectives but whatever they are, they don’t cover the same ground. This Alternate Ending is a companion to Lynsey’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf review of 24 August.
Though the characters are disconnected from society, in no way does the audience feel disconnected from them. The camera work is close, sometimes too close, for the frame often seems so narrow there is an anxiety swelling in the breast of your reviewer in being blinded to the potential violence that awaits just out of shot. This potentiality is omnipresent.
But I must concede that young love often feels like a close-up of two characters, where everything else is background – out of focus or omitted completely.
When the camera does pan back and the wider world is allowed in that stillness is replaced. There is constant motion. It’s like jumping out of bed to a fire alarm: From nothing to all.
I suppose that is the life of those who call the street ‘home’. Home in this context is more than an affectation, for the bridge really feels like theirs. And in all of Paris our two lovers (les amants) and their facilitator/benefactor are the only vagrants (another French word – to wander) we see.
As Lynsey mentioned, this movie was part of a series by the IFI in Dublin – The Bigger Picture – and chosen on this occasion by IFI projectionist Paul Markey. He gave a short introduction to the film, where among other nuggets revealed to us, that because of filming delays director Leos Carax was forced to recreate a to scale replica the Pont-Neuf (See picture). Paul described this movie as formative early viewing experience, one which described that rinse cycle of emotion we all feel in early adolescence. When I think back to my younger self I can how it could speak to the wildness and freedom I craved from those first loves.
But now, as an adult , I see that ultimately this movie is about control. It is the threat of male violence and the fragility of the male ego driving it. Our male protagonist sabotages attempts by his lover’s family to find her, the renewed promise of saving her failing eyesight does nothing to ameliorate this threat.
Even at the end reunited and reformed, the prospect of losing her, even if only for a night back to a normality that he is incapable of conforming to, he threatens her life by catapulting both himself and her into the January Seine. In the last scenes they ‘lovingly’ decide to head to pastures new. However, it is our protagonist’s control of his lover through violence that has reduced her agency and removed choice. In a way it’s fitting. They are, in a sense, riding off into the sunset and in Hollywood that often means violent means to justify peaceful ends.
A Room With No View 