| Lulu
on the Bridge
Paul Auster USA
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| Like a puzzle within a riddle within an enigma, Lulu on the Bridge,
novelist and sometime screenwriter Paul Auster's solo directorial debut,
is likely to leave audiences as tantalised as some of his efforts on paper
leave readers.
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The film's impressive cast features Harvey Keitel as Izzy Maurer, a jazz saxophonist who is struck by a stray bullet during a performance in a New York nightclub. After his recovery, he stumbles upon the body of a stranger and winds up with the dead man's briefcase, which contains a napkin with a telephone number written on it and a box containing a mysterious stone. This discovery leads to a love affair with actress Celia Burns (Mira Sorvino), a film within a film produced by Philip Kleinman (Mandy Patinkin), an interrogation by the mysterious Dr Van Horn (Willem Dafoe) and the appearance of Izzy's ex-wife (Gina Gershon). For Auster, who wrote the script for Smoke and, essentially, co-directed that film and its improvised successor, Blue in the Face, as well, Lulu represents an effort to tell a story in which, in Auster's words, "meaning [is conveyed] through images rather than words." "There is a strong visual component," Auster told Moving Pictures. "Everything was present [in my mind] when I was writing the screenplayÉ Then I had a meeting with the cinematographer, Alik Sakharov. It turned out that he had come to the same conclusions as I about the film and how it should look." Although the story came to Auster during post-production of Smoke and Blue in the Face, he spent six months trying to turn it into a novel before concluding that it was a story fit for the screen. Jeff Sipe |
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