None of the characters are on screen for more than five minutes, but that doesn’t
prevent us from connecting with them.
By: Anthony Stoeckert
Paris Je T’aime is a mix of small wonders collected together to form one big one. It’s a series of short films, each about five minutes long, all taking place in Paris and all about love.
That may sound limiting, but there are a lot of different kinds of love out there. Romantic love, paternal love, fading love, crazy love and vampire love the films in Paris Je T’aime touch upon all of these.
Paris, itself, also has a lot of variety. Each of the 18 films takes place in a different "arrondissement" (neighborhood) of Paris (the city actually has 20 arrondissements, but two reportedly didn’t make the cut because they didn’t fit the tone of the overall project). Based on this movie, people in Paris seem to deal with problems that are typical for city folk: they get mugged, struggle to find parking spaces, and wait for subway trains (though Steve Buscemi’s character does a very New York thing by peaking down the train tunnel, as if that will make the train arrive sooner).
The first segment shows us a lonely man (Bruno Podalydés) who sees a woman (Florence Muller) collapse outside his parked car. He gets out to help her and the crowd assumes they’re married (the man doesn’t correct them, he enjoys being part of a couple). She rests in his car for a while, they connect and it’s onto the next film.
We go on to meet a high school boy who comes to the aid of a Muslim girl he’s enchanted with, an actress (Natalie Portman) who falls in love with a blind man, and a mugging victim who asks the emergency responder treating him to have a cup of coffee with him.
The acting, most of it, is wonderful. Gena Rowlands and Ben Gazzara are a joy as a long-separated couple who meet in a café to discuss their divorce (Gerard Depardieu plays the café owner and co-directs) and Juliette Binoche will break your heart as a mother given one last chance to embrace her dead son (or at least dream it); watch the way she treasures each kiss she gives the child.
None of these characters are on screen for more than five minutes, but that doesn’t prevent us from connecting with them. It takes a heart of stone not to be happy for two people falling in love, or to feel the pain of a mother who misses her dead child, but that we care so much about them is a testament to the movie’s writing, acting and directing.
It’s not all sadness and heartbreak. Buscemi gives a wordless, comic performance as a subway traveler who makes unfortunate eye contact in a segment directed by Joel and Ethan Coen (leave it to the Coen brothers to set their film in the district that houses the Louvre, only to have all the action occur in a subway station). Emily Mortimer and Rufus Sewell get a lesson in love from Oscar Wilde’s ghost in Pere Lachaise cemetery, and Bob Hoskins and Fanny Ardant play a long-married couple trying to spice up their lives.
The movie saves the best for last. "14th Arrondisement," directed by Alexander Payne (who also plays Wilde’s ghost in the earlier segment), stars Margo Martindale as Carol, a mail carrier from Denver on a solo vacation to Paris.
Carol narrates the film in the form of a report written for her French club, and her American-ized French induces plenty of chuckles. But there’s a beautiful, simple wisdom in her thoughts and as we learn about her, it’s hard to disagree with the life lesson she learns in the City of Love: There’s enough to make you cry in this world, but still more good than bad. Carol is a sort of opposite of Miles from Payne’s brilliant Sideways: female, sober, optimistic, but just as lonely.
Martindale is a wonderful actress who did terrific work in Sidney Lumet’s TV show 100 Centre Street a few years back, but has been mostly playing thankless roles in television and movies since (her poorly written part as Hilary Swank’s mother in Million Dollar Baby was that movie’s lone misstep). Working with Payne has done wonders for Thomas Haden Church let’s hope something similar happens for Martindale.
Paris Je T’aime isn’t perfect; everyone is sure to dislike some of the segments. Alfonso Cuarón’s is little more than an excuse to show off (haven’t we all gotten over being impressed with long tracking shots by now?), a segment starring Barbet Schroeder as a salesman is confusing and pretentious, and I moaned the second I saw a mime in "Tour Eiffel."
Mimes aside, the movie is a joy. Along with all that love on the screen, you’re sure to fall in love with Paris itself before Paris Je T’aime is over. That opening shot of the Eiffel Tower bursting to life alone is enough to make even Bill O’Reilly book a seat on Air France’s next flight.
Rated R for language and brief drug use. 116 minutes.