Paris, as the title of Jacques Rivette’s debut feature put it, belongs to whoever can claim it, but in Le Pont du Nord it might be the last lawless outpost of a dying world. This panoptic Babylon filled with mythic beasts, men named Max, and sphinxlike trials appears to be rigged against a quixotic duo: Marie (Bulle Ogier) and Baptiste (Pascale Ogier, Bulle’s daughter). Baptiste is introduced like the independent motorcyclist of Howard Hawks’s Red Line 7000; when she crashes into Marie, breathing her first free air after serving time for bank robbery, their pasts (and performance styles) are redirected toward a singular destination. While Marie is beset by maladies (prison-like claustrophobia and painful memories), Baptiste is a kata-practising warrior whose theft of a map, imprinted with the ancient board game ?“Game of the Goose,” provides the open-air film with its orbiting structure of coincidental reunions—if coincidences truly exist in this world.

In French with English subtitles