Straddling a fine line between greatness and folly, Les Amants du Pont-Neuf might be director Leos Carax's most infamous work. Carax's crackpot epic romance seemed doomed to a cursed existence from the beginning. Starring Denis Lavant and Juliette Binoche as two bums who fall in love, the movie received ecstatic notices upon its 1991 Cannes Film Festival premiere, only to meet with an indifferent box office. Perhaps Promethean hubris sealed its fate; the movie famously rebuilt Paris' Pont-Neuf and the banks of the Seine to fulfill Carax's grandiose vision. Three years in the making and three times over budget, Les Amants is the most extravagant expression of Carax's pet theme of l'amour fou. Unhindered by intellectual concerns, Les Amants is a purely instinctive act of filmmaking. Transfixed by the sublime (and skirting dangerously close to the ridiculous), the movie betrays a belief in cinema as a purely visceral medium. The apotheosis of Carax's heedless approach is a jaw-dropping Bastille Day set piece: the two lovers dance, scream, and cavort against a backdrop of fireworks and a cacophony of rap, classical, and dance music. It's a defining moment in Carax's canon, and, some might argue, a high that the movie never fully recovers from. For all its flaws, this unabashedly whimsical movie sustains, if unevenly, its exuberant vision. Reckless, excessive, and seized of millennial delirium, Carax's valentine to Paris may be remembered as one of the epochal movies of 1990s world cinema.