Paris, Je T'aime

Written at the time of the film's release. It's still a favorite of mine. Like a good French meal...lots of courses of small plates (if you don't like one, another will be on its way in ten minutes). Bon apetit!

Paris, Je'taime (Various, 2006) You give 22 directors two days in a particular quartier of Paris to film a "love story" and watch what happens.* The results are varied in tone and success, but all are unique in story-line and subject matter and look. 

If ever there was a movie to show the distinctiveness of the individual creator, despite their GPS position, this movie is it.

The cluster of films is like reading a good collection of short stories, all with just enough "hook" to make an impression, and in some cases, leave you wanting more. There is no continuity between them, save for a film-ending coda that combines several of the stars in brief tableaux while the segments are buttressed by nicely composed documentary shots of the city. That's merely the cartilage holding segments together. The soul of the thing are the many segments and the many takes on the city and its reputation.
1) Montmartre (Bruno Podalydès) The writer-director stars in his own contribution of a motorist who finally finds a parking space at the exact moment he's needed the most. Told mostly from the driver's perspective.
2) Quais de Seine (Gurinder Chadha) Cultural sensitivity is helped by mutual attraction as a young man (Cyril Descours) leaves his slacker pals and comes to the aid of a Muslim girl (Leïla Bekhti) on her way to the Mosque.
3) Le Marais (Gus Van Sant) a young man (Gaspard Ulliel) approaches a worker (Elias McConnell) at a printing press and stammers through a conversation about soul-mates that doesn't quite get through.
4) Tuileries (Joel and Ethan Coen) Contrarians The Coen Brothers spend their time in the Museum District inside the tube as a tourist (Steve Buscemi) has several culture clashes in Paris' seat of culture. Amazing how much story-line the Coens can cram into a short film...and how much animosity towards the French.
5) Loin du 16e (Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas) A nanny (Catalina Sandino Moreno of "Maria Full of Grace") makes a long commute to her charge and finds in it a moment of self-reflection.
6) Porte de Choisy (Christopher Doyle) Paris' Chinatown is given a Hong-Kong movie-maker's flair (by the cinematographer of, among others, "Shanghai Express") as a beauty products salesman (director/actor Barbet Schroeder) makes a call on a tough customer (Li Xin) running a salon. Stylized and witty, with equal parts sweet and sour.
7) Bastille (Isabel Coixet) A straying husband (Sergio Castellitto) meets his wife (Miranda Richardson) for lunch and instead of breaking up with her, finds himself devoting himself to her, utterly. Coixet has fun with a tragic story set in, pointedly of all places, Paris' prison district.
8) Place des Victoires (Nobuhiro Suwa) A grieving mother (Juliette Binoche) is given a last chance to make peace with her dead child with the help of a spectral cowboy (Willem Dafoe)
9) Tour Eiffel (Sylvain Chomet) "The Triplettes of Belleville" animator shows he's just as talented in "live action" doing a stop-motion film of a young boy relating the story of how his parents, both despised mimes, met and fell in love. Magical.
10) Parc Monceau (Alfonso Cuarón) Told in one continuous take, an older man (Nick Nolte) and younger woman (Ludivine Sagnier) meet at a pre-arranged place and speak of their worries about what will come next. Economical and sly, Cuarón also plays tributes to the other directors of "Paris, Jetaime" while he's at it.
11) Quartier des Enfants Rouges (Olivier Assayas) An American actress (Maggie Gyllenhaal) acting in a period drama, develops an addiction for her drug-supplier (Lionel Dray).
12) Place des fêtes (Oliver Schmitz) A Nigerian busker (Seydou Boro) gets his wish to have coffee with a woman he has fallen for (Aïssa Maïga). Told in brief flash-back with all the qualities of a dream.
13) Pigalle (Richard LaGravenese) Fanny Ardant and Bob Hoskins play a couple who are also players, creating a scenario on their anniversary to put a little spark into the act.
14) Quartier de la Madeleine (Vincenzo Natali) Gothic vampire tale of a tourist (Elijah Wood) who stumbles upon the activities of a beautiful vampiress (Olga Kurylenko). Love sucks.
15) Père-Lachaise (Wes Craven) Of course, Wes Craven gets the cemetery! But, he makes a simple film about love between a bickering couple (Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer) with a bit of poetic justice from Oscar Wilde (Alexander Payne).
16) Faubourg Saint-Denis (Tom Tykwer) Tykwer manipulates cinematic time and space chronicalling a love affair with an American drama student (Natalie Portman) passing before the blind eyes of a young musician (Melchior Beslon).
17) Quartier Latin (Gérard Depardieu and Frédéric Auburtin) Written by Gena Rowlands, who also stars with fellow Cassavettes Company alum Ben Gazzara, as a long-estranged couple who meet for a drink before finalizing their long-delayed divorce.
18) 14e arrondissement (Alexander Payne) An American (the wonderful Margo Martindale) on her first trip to Europe gives a report to her French class (in the language) of her trip.

Is there a favorite of mine? Yes. But like a French meal of many courses, if you're dissatisfied with any of the items, they're brief enough that another will come along shortly. What's interesting is that so many end with the turn of a franc that you don't realize just how well-done they are until they're gone...and a memory.

* There are 20 districts, but two of the pieces didn't make the cut.

The Illusionist (2010)

Written at the time of the film's release...



"The Disappearing Act"
or
"We Liked His Earlier, Funny Ones..."

The French comic/film-maker Jacques Tati left one un-produced screenplay when he died in 1982. That script, entitled "Film Tati Nº 4," is the basis for animator Sylvain Chomet's first feature after The Triplettes of Belleville, The Illusionist (or L'Illusionniste). It is a lettre d'amour to Tati, with a main character resembling the French Master in size, style and manner (right down to the examination of the world with hands placed on the back of one's hips), directed in the same spare long-shot frame that allows disaster to occur from corner to corner.  It has the same errant mechanics (the sense that what could go wrong will go wrong), the ironic timing and "marking time" quality of Tati's films, in the elegantly focused manner of silent films with sound effects.

But, it is a special case. Tati wrote this after Mon Oncle and never made it, for whatever reason, coming down to mostly personal grief...but over whom is much in dispute. Tati had two daughters, a child-out-of wedlock whom he abandoned, named Helga, and his legitimate daughter Sophie. Tati was going to make the film with Sophie in the 1960's, but never did. His estrangement from his daughters weighed heavily on him, and the result—this melancholy little mea culpa—might have seemed as cheer-dousing as Charlie Chaplin playing MacBeth. Or, it was simply too "close" to commit to.

A not-too-well-considered prestidigitater, Tatischeff (Tati's real name, by the way) is pulling a living out of his hat on a low-rent club circuit. It is 1956, and rock n' roll is filling the theaters, and television is emptying the minds.  Tatischeff can't compete with his props and particularly ill-mannered rabbit (he bites!) and he plays empty halls to little applause. An invitation to perform at a private party in Scotland turns out relatively well, and he stays, making the acquaintance of Alice, who works the tavern and sees Tatischeff as a genuine magician. Noting the condition of her shoes, he buys her a nice pair of red ones, leaving her convinced her that actual magic can happen.

On a trip to Edinburgh,* he discovers that Alice has followed him without a ticket.  He buys her one, and the two travel the rest of the way together and settle in the city in a flop-house for performers. While Tatischeff performs to the dwindling crowds at the Music Hall, Alice cooks, cleans, becomes the roving ambassador to the other performers and wanders the streets looking at the promises of a better life in Edinburgh shop-windows. 

The relationship between performer and waif is completely a father-daughter relationship. He is a bit aloof, but tries to provide for her dreams by taking on a series of increasingly demeaning jobs, which he manages to pull off with uneasy aplomb. She cares for him, but looks to the horizon. At some point, his job is to let her go...to perform his own disappearing act in her life, if she is to have one. Bittersweet, to be sure.

The Illusionist also has up its sleeve the constant thread that everything is an illusion: performers and artisans put their best face forward, we hide behind masks, we project elegance, we learn as we go becoming expert only after trial and error, and there is nothing so false as the entertainment industry with its sad clowns, facile crooners and feathered chorines. There are no inner lives on stage, only the projection of illusion, a made-up false-front for reality.

Rich in detail and sub-text, it's the sort of quietly deep-thinking comedy that has mostly been absent since Tati passed, and though it has its laugh-out-loud moments, it is mostly a meditation on the transitory nature of life, how we dress it up, corral the chaos, change it, make it into reality only to see it fade and move on. It is partially performance, partially illusion, but we are constantly changing, turning something into something else. Life is what we make it and what it makes us.  

* I've been to Edinburgh—it's where Chomet's studio, Django films was located—and the recreation of the city is amazing.  There were all the places I'd seen, but all in the wrong place, a scrambled Edinburgh that doesn't lose any of its charm.