Léos Carax's The Lovers of Pont Neuf was termed a work of artistic extravagance and a financial fiasco, and remains virtually unseen in the U.S. The film's vision of love and madness-an amour fou between a grimy tramp and a street painter slowly going blind (Juliette Binoche)-is echoed by its massive, almost delirious art design. The lovers' tortured romance is set on and around the Pont Neuf, but, unwilling to film on the oldest bridge in Paris, Carax earned the wrath of investors and the awe of cineastes by recreating the entire structure, as well as the neighborhood around it, in southern France. Carax constructs a world filled with, in Jonathan Rosenbaum's words, "cascading and overlapping poetic conceits, explosions of feeling and pure sensation."