He is a moody chap - laid-back and mellow, depressed at times and self-isolated. He is much more like the Keitel character we saw in The Piano (1993) than any up-tempo Tarantino film! Anyway, the story starts as we watch him going about his craft, when some fruit-loop bursts in with a gun, shoots Izzy in the chest and then shoots himself. Izzy survives a seven-hour operation but loses his left lung. Because his lung capacity is gone, his identity and his passion for playing are completely destroyed. He falls even deeper into an isolated depression.
Slowly venturing back into the world after a while, coaxed by his ex-wife Hanna (played by Gina Gershon), he goes to a dinner party she is throwing, where he meets film director Catherine Moore (Vanessa Redgrave). Meanwhile, we are briefly introduced to Celia Burns (Mira Sorvino), a struggling young actress working as a waitress who happens to buy Izzy’s CD, fascinated by the musician who can never play again. One night, walking through the wet streets of Manhattan, Izzy stumbles upon a dead body. Panicked, he steals the dead man's leather bag. Inside, he finds a serviette with a phone number and a strange, unearthly stone that glows with a brilliant blue light and levitates when the room is dark!
Intrigued, Izzy calls the number and Celia answers. He invites himself to her flat, demands to know what she knows about the dead man, and shows her the serviette and glowing stone. They are both transfixed by it, and when they touch it together, they experience a magical kind of surge of connection and immediately fall deeply, intensely in love! Izzy becomes entirely consumed by Celia. He gets a job at her restaurant just to be near her and when she auditions for Catherine Moore's new film - a remake of Frank Wedekind's classic tragedy Lulu - Izzy uses his connections to help her land the title role.
So Celia flies out to Dublin to begin filming, with Izzy promising to join her in a few days. But the moment she leaves, things take a bizarre turn for the worse for Izzy. Things are going swimmingly for Celia and she is doing a fab job with her acting, but he has disappeared. She tries to phone him (these are landline days, so there is no ready access to mobiles) but he doesn't answer. We see what happens to him, but I won't spoil that for you - from hereon in, you're on your own!
A young-looking Willem Dafoe pops in for a kind of cameo as a deeply unsettling Dr Van Horn, who seems to know something about the stone Izzy found, and wants it back! He seems to know everything there is to know about Izzy and his life, even his recent infatuation with Celia, who is still trying to phone Izzy at his flat between filming scenes. Turns out that through reflection, Izzy really has been a bit of a selfish cad his whole life and Van Horn brings it all up for us to know too.
Back to Dublin, then, and Celia is panicking by now because she hasn't heard from Izzy. She abandons her filming on the last day, much to the distress of those around her, and, like Izzy, disappears (with the stone). Nobody knows where she is, except for us, and huge searches of Dublin return nothing.
Keitel is terrific, as always, and the supporting cast is right up there with him. There's a very funny cameo when Lou Reed pops into a scene that Celia has filmed in the past and is showing Izzy, but she tells him that it's not Lou Reed - and in the credits, the character is actually called 'Not Lou Reed', but it is Lou Reed!
The film also has a 1980s feel about it, even though it's not, and for me, features many nods to Woody Allen. The music - solo piano with hints towards light jazz - and the story being about filmmakers and scriptwriters all hint at a romantic, tragic love story, though without being littered with Allen's signature one-liners! Then there's Mira Sorvino, who was fabulous in Mighty Aphrodite three years prior, and Gina Gershon from Allen's Rifkin's Festival in 2020. It might be my imagination, but it just feels like a largely dialogue-driven New York story of which he'd have been proud.
The cinematography was also interesting, as the director made good use of lighting and shadows, verging on a noir approach. When Izzy was alone, particularly, wallowing in self-pity, isolated, sad and reflective, he was often half-lit in dim interiors and other characters in long shots of wet streets were significant throughout. It also seems to have been shot in 4:3, adding to the nostalgic tone. It's a super little film which has some real depth to it, and which I enjoyed very much. Now for the spoilers...
Spoilers From Hereon In
When Izzy disappears, he has actually been abducted by Van Horn's heavies and thrown into a dungeon-style room, where the doctor interrogates him to find out where the stone is, as it's valuable and he needs it back. He doesn't buy the notion that Izzy stumbled on the body, but thinks rather that he knew the man. Izzy doesn't crack, though, even when Van Horn reveals that he knows all about Celia and that Izzy will never see her again if he doesn't hand over the stone. He's locked in this room for days on end.
Meanwhile, Celia, heartbroken in Dublin and thinking that Izzy has abandoned her, takes the stone and throws it into the river. She then suddenly realises that she is being cornered by Van Horn's henchmen. Believing life is not worth living without Izzy, she follows the stone into the drink and ends it all.
But hold on, because we now cut right back to the beginning with Izzy lying on the floor of the club with a bullet in him and we see him being loaded into the back of an ambulance. On the way to the hospital, he dies. He never had surgery. He never lost his lung. He never found a body, a stone or got abducted. As the ambulance pulls away, it passes Celia walking along the pavement. In reality, she and Izzy never met. She simply walks away into the night.
Lulu on the Bridge takes place entirely in the brief window of time between life and death. The glowing rock, the intense romance and the kidnapping are the subconscious mind desperately spinning a narrative to cope with sudden trauma. The rock represents the final spark of human consciousness. When Izzy and Celia touch it, they feel 'connected to everything' - the euphoric feeling of transitioning out of life.
Willem Dafoe's character isn't a mobster, a government agent, or a doctor, he is Izzy’s own conscience forcing him to confront his selfishness, his coldness and his ego before his 'soul' can move on. Izzy's captivity in the room is the painful process of dying - a dying man's dream. He is trapped inside his own failing mind, often half-lit, as mentioned above, because he is transitioning from the light of life into the darkness of death. It's a heavy, hauntingly poetic film about what might have been if two souls had crossed paths under different circumstances and well worth a look. Particularly if you didn't read these spoilers!
I have the DVD from years back and shockingly never watched it! I'm sure it can be found by now in various places though being 28 years old!
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