Infidelity is certainly one of the most popular transgressions ever put on film, partially because we all have opinions, usually strong ones, about it.
One of Hollywood’s more spectacular commercial successes in that area was Fatal Attraction, a seductive but hugely biased work that outrightly blamed women for men’s wandering sexual ways. The uproar the film caused (and the comment it inspired, mainly in women’s magazines) echoed Bill Clinton’s recent escapades. As far as Bill’s shenanigans were concerned, however, the French couldn’t understand what the fuss was all about. If infidelity is considered a transgression elsewhere, the French seem to consider it an institution.
Thus in The Bridge we start off in an early-Sixties cinema where an attractive Mina (ex-Bond girl Carole Bouquet) spends her Saturday afternoons with her teenage son. They go mainly to escape her married, provincial ennui out in Normandy.
The first film they see is Francois Truffaut’s Jules et Jim of the same period, an episodic melodrama about the eternal love triangle that, if nothing else, celebrates friendship as being greater than who sleeps with or fights for whom. This is Mina’s only escape from her builder husband Georges (Gerard Dépardieu) who has been around ever since Cézanne immortalised him in The Card Players.
Into their life comes the engineer Matthias (Charles Berling) who has designed the titular bridge to be erected outside their town. Georges has to go away to work on that construction and she and the engineer start an affair with the full knowledge of her son who, like most teenagers, doesn’t have much of an opinion about anything. Thus: a woman who is married to a good but struggling and rational bourgeois falls for a rather slimy but slightly more prosperous and adventurous bourgeois. Unlike Jules and Jim, the two men have nothing in common.
But it is in the execution of this simple plot that the film shines. It is so breathtakingly understated and non-judgemental that – with Medea and Othello lurking somewhere in our Western subconscious – one constantly expects an explosion of some sorts.
There are no heavy scores – the music is almost always sourced to a radio – nor are there any heavy dramatics or lighting set-ups. Life out in the provinces slowly but relentlessly leads one to the overwhelming conclusion that the film-makers are not going to tell us what to think. It could be an indictment of all three characters, or their class, or country, or it could be the most closeted comedy of the year – but a work of sustained art it most certainly is.
Dépardieu, who also co-directed the film, has finally edited away the finicky acting flab he used to have (now the flab’s just physical) and plays the builder with the restraint that conceals true sorrow.
It quietly confirms him as a giant – literally and figuratively – of modern cinema.