PARIS JE T'AIME
Reviewed by Harvey S. Karten
First Look Pictures
Grade: B
Directed by: Bruno Podalydes, Gruinder Chadha, Gus Van Sant, Joel and Ethan Coen, Walter Salles,
Daniela Thomas, Christopher Doyle, Isabelle Coixet, Nobuhiro Suwa, Sylvain Chomet, Alfonso Cuaron,
Richard LaGravanese, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Schmitz, Tetsuo Negata, Wes Craven, Gerard Depardieu, Frederic Auburtin, Alexander Payne
Written By: Bruno Podalydes, Gus Van Sant, Joel and Ethan Coen, Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas,
Christopher Doyle, Isabelle Coixet, Nobuhiro Suwa, Sylvain Chomet, Alfonso Cuaron, Richard
LaGravanese, Olivier Assayas, Olivier Schmitz, Tetsuo Nagata, Wes Craven, Gena Rowlands,
Alexander Payne
Cast: Florence Muller, Bruno Podalydes, Leila Bekhti, Cyril Descours, Marianne Faithfull, Elias
McConnell, Gaspard Ulliel, Steve Buscemi, Julie Bataille, Axel Kiener, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Barbet
Schroeder, Li Xin, Sergio Castellitto, Miranda Richardson, Leonor Watling, Juliette Binoche, Willem
Dafoe, Hippolyte Girardot, Paul Putner, Yolande Moreau, Nick Nolte, Ludivine Sagnier, Bob Hoskins,
Fanny Ardant, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Lionel Dray, Aissa Maiga Seydou Boro, Elijah Wood, Olga Kurylenko,
Natalie Portman, Melchior Beslon, Margo Martindale
Screened at: Review 1, NYC, 4/3/07
Opens: May 4, 2007
If New York is the world's most exciting city and Prague the prettiest, then Paris is the most romantic.
With this in mind, twenty directors were invited to go into eighteen distinctive neighborhoods of the City
of Lights to penetrate beyond the picture postcard stereotypes, to treat the town as though it were a
character with many facets, diverse personalities. What emerges is, truly, anything but a Hallmark card. The emphasis is on the light and airy, some coming off as actors’ exercises, while others, given the short time the casts and crews have to make their points, genuinely poignant or funny as the case may be. A few are dreadfully amateurish, surprisingly so considering the backgrounds of the directors and performers.
The most delightful pieces are the simplest, involving those plots which are the least complicated, the chamber pieces focusing on relationships between two people, in a single case on just one individual.
For example, who in the audience cannot see himself or herself in the adolescent horseplay in Gurinder Chadha’s “Quais de Seine?” You were (or are) a young woman harassed by teen jerks or a young man with a group of your friends, probably terrified by women and secure in the knowledge that your catcalls will get you nowhere, right? One fellow, Francois (Cyris Descours), has a better idea. When he sees a lovely Muslim girl, Zarka (Leila Bekhi), falling backwards, he breaks from his small gangs of fellows to assist, helping her reattach her veil. Zarka explain that her veil is not meant to cover her beauty but is a source of her identity: it makes her feel good. He follows her to the mosque, awaits her return and is dismayed to see her leave with her grandfather. But a surprise awaits him.
In the evening’s comic gem–one which any New Yorker can say, “Hey, I don’t have to ride the Paris Metro to know about that!” Steve Buscemi plays a tourist who waits for a train while he reads a guidebook, ignoring a passage warning, “Do not make eye contact.” He gets the same treatment at the station there that he’d get 3200 miles west in New York at an equally deserted station in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Tuileries.”
For a noirish and stylistic standout, no other regisseur in “Paris Je T’Aime” can come close to Canadian writer-director Vincenzo Natali’s “Quartier de la Madeleine.” Elijah Wood stars as the Young Man walking alone on a dark and foggy night, slipping on a pool of blood when he encounters a beautiful vampire (Olga Kurylenko). What to do? He has fallen in love with her and she with him, and she is reluctant to sink her fangs into the lad! He has other ideas, though.
In a lovely, bittersweet tale of two aging people on the eve of their divorce, the script by Gena Rowlands, directed by Gerard Depardieu and Frederic Auburtin, Ben (Ben Gazzara) and his estranged wife Gena (Gena Rowlands) meet for a final drink, superficially still friends, but hostile remarks surface as though by osmosis. News that Ben, now seemingly in his 80s, is about to become a father, is met with disbelief and envy in “Quartier Latin.”
And speaking of the not so young, Margo Martindale does beautifully as a late middle-aged American postal worker who speaks French with a terrible accent–but give her credit for trying. She’s on her first trip to Europe, she’s independent and so does not take a group tour, but travels alone. She’s lonely, but she has a joyous epiphany while sitting on a park bench, and the script, the direction, the acting all come together nicely in Alexander Payne’s “Arrondissement.”
Not successful at all are the likes of Bruno Podalydes’s “Montmartre,” about a man in his car who wonders why he cannot find a girlfriend until he gets his chance; Gus Van Sant’s “Le Marais,” about a young man drawn to a printer’s apprentice who does not speak French; and especially Nobushiro Suwa’s “Place des Victoires” about a woman who hears the voice of her son a week after his death only to see a ghostly, equestrian cowboy.
Several other shorts are middling in a film that on the whole is worth seeing for the episodes that work quite well.
Not Rated. 120 minutes © 2007 by Harvey Karten Member: NY Film Critics Online
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