Motorcycles, cars, trucks, trains, helicopters, boats, bicycles;
for a film in which everyone walks, Jacques Rivette's Le Pont du Nord is filled with vehicles. Two women - Baptiste, a seemingly self-taught karate enthusiast who
wears a wristwatch on her upper arm and cuts the eyes out of movie posters; and
Marie, just out of jail with a bottomless hip-flask and a debilitating fear of
enclosed spaces - wander the streets of Paris investigating the mysteries held
within a briefcase filled with pages and pages of newspaper clippings, and a
map of the city with a game-board drawn
over it.
Much like the roar of the unseen helicopter that opens
the film, Le Pont du Nord's depths are
suggested rather than shown. Eschewing convention, Rivette instead fills his
idiosyncratic version of Paris with images of construction sites, staircases,
and statues of lions, offering the briefest glimpse of their significance before
flying off to look at something else, while his characters do the same, rushing
around the city following hazy-at-best clues that may or may not lead to another.
They're lost in a labyrinth of side-streets and dead-ends, but when the
questions are so mystifying, who needs answers? After all, you can't fight
dragons with logic.