Paris, je t'aime (2006)

Any anthology film comprised of 18 short films from as many different filmmakers is bound to be hit or miss. Paris je t'aime is no exception, although the good does outweigh the bad. It's worth seeing, and if you like it I'd also recommend Paris vu par, an obvious inspiration made in the 1960s by a group of French New Wave directors.

Watching 18 films in a row was a little bit of an endurance test. The film, however, is tailor made for YouTube, so I've included links to YouTube rips of the various shorts...

The weakest shorts, in my opinion, were: Wes Craven's "Père-Lachaise", Nobuhiro Suwa's "Place des Victoires", Vincenzo Natali's "Quartier de la Madeleine", Olivier Assayas' "Quartier des Enfants Rouges", and Joel & Ethan Coen's "Tuileries". Christopher Doyle's "Port de Choisy" was also a bit of a misfire, but it was so beautifully shot and so extraordinarily peculiar that it has stuck in my memory.

I thought the strongest entries were the ones that were either simple and sweet or structurally and formally ambitious...

Alfonso Cuarón's "Parc Monceau" was very effective in its simplicity. It mostly just revolves around a conversation between two people (one of whom is Nick Nolte) and was shot in a single long take (continuing Cuarón's experimentation of the long take in Children of Men). The film does the best job of all the films at eavesdropping on a slice of Parisian life, and it has a few unexpected surprises up its sleeve.

Sylvain Chomet's "Tour Eiffel" does the remarkable job of making mimes endearing and lovable, and it has a visual style all of its own.

Gérard Depardieu's "Quartier Latin" is both a love letter to Paris and a love letter to acting. It stars two of Cassavete's favorite actors, Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara, as an old couple going through a divorce who meet at a Parisian bar. The chemistry and sense of history between the two is sizzling.

Oliver Schmitz's "Place des Fêtes" has a playful and ambitious flashback structure and feels like a perfectly conceived short film: it has the structure and tragedy of a film noir, but its tone is breezy, sweet and romantic.

Tom Tykwer's "Faubourg Saint-Denis" was one of my two favorite films, and was structurally and formally the most daring. It's about a romance between an actress (Natalie Portman) and a blind guy (Melchior Beslon), and it creates even more of an adrenaline rush than Run Lola Run. Few short films are so densely packed with images, ideas, and emotions.

Alexander Payne's "14ème Arrondissement" was my other favorite. It best captured the essence of "Paris, je t'aime" in its story of a lonely, middle aged, working class Denver woman coming to Paris on vacation. I particularly liked how Payne paid homage to Jean-Paul Sartre and subtly riffed on Sartre's existential novel Nausea. The film is structured around a voiceover that reads aloud (in rudimentary French) the woman's diary entry, mimicking the diary style of Nausea; but Payne inverts the moment of existential despair in Sartre's novel by replaying it as a moment of quiet transcendence as the woman sits on a bench and takes Paris in.