French cinema at its best...
What is it about French films that makes the best of them so deeply reflective in a way that few American and British films achieve? Maybe it's that France itself is such a beautiful and evocative country, maybe it's that the French have a lifestyle that, for us non-French, appears so stylish and romantic... whatever... but when they get it right they really are in a different class, and "Paris" most definitely gets it right.
Beautifully filmed, brilliantly acted, and underpinned by a superb soundtrack, the film explores "real" peoples' lives slowly and above all subtly. Not a great deal happens, and there are no conclusions to the stories involved - a guy gets diagnosed with a life threatening heart condition, another chap falls in love with one of his students, a lonely single mother and a market stall trader are hesitantly drawn together, and an African dreams of getting to Paris to start a new life. That's about it really. But it's the way that this is all put together...
Beautiful, entrancing, and deep
This is a French movie made for a French audience. As a result, for Americans, it provides a window into another culture which is familiar in some ways, but quite different in others. Personally, I love movies which transport me in this way.
Not surprisingly, the movie is visually beautiful, and thus does justice to the beauty of Paris. But more importantly, the movie uses its distinctively French style and sensibility in order to probe many facets of the human condition in a sensitive, penetrating, and balanced manner, thus taking us on quite a journey of diverse vicarious experiences, thoughts on questions big and small, and a wide spectrum of simple and complex emotions. In short, the movie gave me a lot to ponder, and I may need to eventually watch it again.
At the end of the journey, it's clear that this is by no means a feel-good movie, and my net feeling was closer to poignance than happiness or even ambivalence. But the movie does also illustrate the...
'Parisians grumble...'
PARIS is a kaleidoscopic view of that great City of Light inhabited with a variety of individuals each of whom is consumed with life and love and living and dying. Cédric Klapisch has written and directed this richly populated canvas as a background of a tender story of a Moulin Rouge male dancer Pierre (Romain Duris) who is diagnosed with a terminal heart disease requiring transplantation if he is to survive. But in the end the many characters introduced in 'incidental stories' have become so interesting that, instead of providing simply a background for Pierre's portrait, they become an integral part of the drama as well as indelibly stamped on the viewer's mind.
Pierre has kept his illness secret, yet when faced with the dire concept of a transplant he confides in his sister Élise (Juliette Binoche), a single mother of three, who takes him in to fill his boring days of self confinement. There is a palpable magic between the two as Élise attempts to...
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