- Léos Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge
A couple Sundays back was the yahrzeit of my cousin Naomi, so I went with my parents and a handful of other relations to the Waldheim Cemetery in Forest Park for the unveiling of her gravestone. The few times I’ve gone to this cemetery, whoever’s driven has taken Harlem Avenue for the final leg of the trip. We go past the Blue Line terminus near the Eisenhower Expressway, and the mass of idle train cars makes me think of coffins converging in some sort of traffic jam of the dead.
It was never hard to persuade her to go to the movies. In December 1999 we made a weekend of Princess Mononoke and Léos Carax’s The Lovers on the Bridge, both of which had just come out in the U.S. for the first time. Her first response to each: “What imagination! Where do these filmmakers get their ideas?” Even then I knew more than she did about how movies are made—regardless, few people have had such a direct influence on my critical practice.
