Hey everyone. Capone in Chicago here. It almost seems like it's too good to be true: a collection of some truly wonderful directors, writers, and actors collaborating on a series of 18 short films celebrating the City of Lights.
Each film is named and set after a particular section or monument in Paris, and you genuinely cannot help but just sit back and enjoy the humorous, tragic, tense, and ultimately uplifting collection of affectionate stories. Not all of the shorts attempt to tell a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. Some are simply brief slices of life to show the universality of particular, seemingly unimportant, moments in our lives. Other vignettes are more complete, sometimes covering months in less than five minutes. The great news about PARIS, JE T'AIME is that there are no duds here. Yes, some of these tales are better than others, but all are rich in their visuals and performances. And while the filmmakers don't attempt to interconnect any of the stories (thank heavens!), these films are made better and more appropriate by being collected like this. Each story enriches the others.
I suppose this would be the appropriate time to go through the inevitable list. A sampling of the directors includes, the UK's Gurinder Chadha (Bend It Like Beckham); Gus Van Sant, the Coen Brothers; Brazil's Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries); Christopher Doyle (long-time cinematographer for directors such as Wong Kar-Wai); Isabel Coixet (My Life, Without Me); Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville); Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men); Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep; Clean); Richard LaGravenese (Living Out Loud, and writer of The Fisher King and Erin Brockovich); Wes Craven; Tom Tykwer (Run Lola Run; Perfume); Gerard Depardieu; and Alexander Payne (Election; Sideways).
The equally impressive partial list of actors includes Steve Buscemi, Catalina Sandino Moreno, director Barbet Schroeder, Miranda Richardson, Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe, Nick Nolte, Ludivine Sagnier, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fanny Ardant, Bob Hoskins, Elijah Wood, Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell, Natalie Portman, Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, and Margo Martindale.
Inevitably, a discussion of PARIS, JE T'AIME will turn into a person talking about which shorts were their favorites or which were the most memorable, but the absolute truth is that all of these stories are worth remembering and reflecting upon. More complete stories such as Tykwer's examination of a relationship between a struggling actress (Portman) and her blind boyfriend (Melchior Beslon), which covers the entirely of their coupling, are just as good as Cuaron's amusing one-take tracking-shot conversation between Nolte and Sagnier, in which she talks about her struggle to meet with him more often because of another guy in her life. This story has a particularly sweet payoff.
I was deeply moved by the segments featuring older actors. Seeing Gazzara and Rowlands (who wrote the story in which she appear) together again will give a charge to any John Cassavetes lovers. They play a couple on the verge of signing their divorce papers, and while the surface conversation seems cordial, the subtext is cruel and hurtful. Maybe my favorite work is Payne's following of Martindale, the splendid character actress currently seen as the neighbor lady on "The Riches" and who turned in memorable performances in Million Dollar Baby (as Hilary Swank's appalling mother) and The Hours. She plays an American postal worker who studied French for two years to prepare for her dream vacation to Paris. Her French isn't very good (she narrates the film in the language), and she moves through the city with guidebook in hand, making no mistake she's a tourist. As she goes from place to place alone, she reflects on her empty existence, culminating in a heartbreaking scene on a park bench. The moment and the short are equal parts devastating and life affirming.
I can't ignore the Coens' hilarious tale of another hapless tourist (Buscemi), complete with guidebook, who makes the near-fatal mistake of looking a Frenchman in the eye. Yikes! The LaGravenese piece featuring Hopkins and Ardant as a couple that meet in a strip club is also quite amusing, and features one of the film's few plot-twist endings.
I found myself particularly drawn to some of the quieter, less flashy works, including the one directed by Chadha concerning a group young Frenchmen yelling out overtly sexual pick-up lines at passing women. When a Muslin girl goes by and trips, they are especially evil. But one of the young men goes to help her, and instantly falls in love. He follows her to her mosque and meets her father in an exchange that does not go where I thought it would. It's a sweet, hopeful, unsentimental story that could easily be translated into a feature film (as could many of these shorts), but works perfectly as an archetype for the quiet power of love. And as well as any of these stories, it perfectly represents what is so great about short films: the boiling down of a plot to its essential points and emotions.
There simply isn't enough support in this country for the art of short filmmaking (animated, documentary, or narrative), but I see it slowly becoming more popular (all three groups of short film Oscar nominees played as packaged programs here in Chicago in the last couple of months), and that's encouraging. PARIS, JE T'AIME is a great primer for those of you who have never taken (or have never had the opportunity to take) the short-film plunge. For those of you that love storytelling on a miniaturized scale, prepare to be impressed beyond words.
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