Northwest Film Forum

Jacques Rivette's classic, absent from our 2007 retrospective and presented here in a new print, features Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale as two marginal characters who find themselves dead center of a political adventure. Over four days they are trapped in a Parisian labyrinth, a kind of French board game, but dangerous when played for real. On the film's world premiere at the 1981 New York Film Festival, Jonathan Rosenbaum called Le Pont du Nord "the most alive movie I saw at the festival.... [It] leaves me with a whole album of indelible images and uncanny encounters.... Shot exclusively in Paris exteriors, it leads like a quixotic fairy tale.... For Baptiste (Pascale Ogier), an abstract punk without a past, for whom 'real life is a reign of terror'...Paris is the tail of the dragon, a city of eyes to be defaced and spies named Max to be faced.... For ex-terrorist, bank robber and prison convict Marie (an equally gritty performance from Bulle Ogier), waiting around for her dreamboat Pierre Clementi to bump her off, it's a conspiratorial spider's web, a marked map of Paris, and intermittently a kid's game...." (in Soho News)