Think of it as cinema living rough, scruffy patches of tedium broken by bursts of lunatic freedom.

A film both glorious and goofy, inspiring affection and exasperation in nearly equal measure.

Carax’s reputation was fully established as a willfully mad maker of ravaged canvases of the heart... damp-dark romantic efflorescence... l’amour fou expressed through the built environment and the fireworks of the heart.

As crazy-pants, eye-popping and swoon-worthy as it was when it first came out, The Lovers on the Bridge is a work of such grand beauty and ambition that I find myself actually pitying those who have never found themselves sharing its glorious wavelength.