screened March 30 2009 on .avi in Weehawken NJ

TSPDT #829 IMDb

Made as an escapist comedy during the death throes of Nazi Germany, Under the Bridges feels like a throwback to a more innocent cinema that never knew the war, reveling in the French romanticism that thrived in the preceding decade: L’Atalante (TSPDT #16); A Day in the Country (TSPDT #153); as well as Boris Barnet’s practically-French By the Bluest of Seas (TSPDT #875).  Two boatmen are tired of a shared love life that amounts to shore leave flings and glances at girls who watch like angels from bridges as their vessel passes beneath their skirts. Masterful camera movements sweep the top deck of a barge, scanning the activity on and around it, or swirl around the racetrack layout of a restaurant in which a flirtatious waitress makes her rounds, sizing up proposals from rivaling suitors. There’s a constant bustle of comings, goings, small heartbreaks and sighs, but like the river barge upon which it is mostly set, the film chugs along with a cheerful stoicism, neither oblivious to life’s endless disappointments nor prone to succumbing to them. It’s a pragmatic strain of romanticism that belongs uniquely to this film.

When the boatmen pick up a troubled girl with a mysterious past and take turns pitching woo to her, the outcome of this romantic rivalry is less important than how this triangle strains the film’s no-nonsense take on the usefulness of love. A tension emerges between the boatmen’s tacit vow to treat work and mating as affairs of pertinence, and a temptation to succumb to swooning romantic impulse, expressed in moments and images of exquisitely subtle beauty: a man and a woman washing each other’s hands or laughing while flipping potato pancakes; the riverside sensuality of listening to frogs ribbitting rhythmically under velvet sheets of night; the emotional upheaval contained in a falling lock of hair. Charged by this clash between practicality and impulse, the film doesn’t move so much as oscillate: its camera swings around a room from corner to corner, face to face, caught between conflicting protocols of courtship. One moment you’re using your pet goose to flirt with the girl you’ve picked up, the next moment you’re serving that same goose to the same girl for dinner, and she’s mortified. One moment you’re charging her 10 marks to ride your barge; the next you’re both calculating how much of a refund to give and receive because things didn’t work out.

Eventually this tension gives way to the gentlest of fights that expresses little more than a desire shared by all three characters: to nurture and be nurtured as friends and lovers. It’s a strangely wise film whose camera traces the daunting eddies of amorous desire, steadied by an undercurrent of calm acceptance at everything that life presents: heartbreak, hardships, even, perhaps, the war raging around the film’s production.  It’s all worth it just for the way the girl says “yeah” and puts her head on her man’s chest near the end.

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