I Love You, 10 or 11 Times More

Paris, I Love You
Various Directors
France
2006

“Paris, I Love You”, the film in English translation is a luscious and enticing splatter of 18 pleasant short films about different pairs of lovers in different occasions, forms, age, sexuality, religion and nationality all in one romantic city called Paris. 18 seemingly unrelated short films are edited together and the final cut is a sweet, delightful and mesmerizing vignettes of love as the most universal concept the history of mankind has ever known. With over a dozen of directors from the vanguard of contemporary cinema, the film soars captivatingly high as the extremely popular romance drama has been elevated to the pedestal of great films still retaining the mush in its seducing and tantalizing authority without ever, not even a single second, letting the viewer remind them of the synthetic mush popular cinema has been feeding its skeptic and/or hopeless romantic audiences.

The following are the 18 short films comprising the lovely “Paris Je T’aime” (in exact order as they appear on the film)

1. “Montmartre”

A man ranting about him being alone when everyone in Paris is with someone finally meets someone.

The first course to this extremely fine dining unlocks the beginning of all the love stories ever—the first meeting. It establishes the worldwide notion of Paris as a lover’s city when the man notices that he is alone in the city and even affirms it when he finally sees one. A simple yet effective way to start the film and would even be more effective after we draw its contrast with the final part at the end. The creativity in shots is also noticeable in “Montmartre”.

2. “Quais de Seine”

A French college boy studying history sees the hidden beauty of a Muslim college girl studying Journalism.

College is one of the most romantic age the modern lover’s cinema has witnessed. I love the fact that with the help of cultural diversity in a contemporary city takes over the generics of this type of love story. The Muslim college girl is indeed beautiful and it’s not hard to believe in what the college boy sees on her. I also love the French sun mellowing Caucasian skin and sensationalizing that of an Eastern skin.

  3. “Le Marais” by Gus Van Sant

An artist feels the urge to talk to someone he thinks is his soul mate. 

Seeing Gaspard Uliel again will be enough to watch this film, after his impressive portrayal of the young Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising. This may not be the most outstanding of all Gus Van Sant works, probably because of the little time he has. However the director is still able to cover this short film with the same mystifying force we have seen from his Cannes Festival winning film “Elephant” and introduce the character in its best effort to direct a very personal, almost inexplicable, sensitivity to someone nothing really more than a stranger.

4. “Tuileries” by Joel & Ethan Coen

An American traveler learns to avoid eye contact to people standing around in the Paris Metro.

 

Seeing Steve Buscemi in something like this is not surprising, instead satisfying. Twice the satisfaction is the Coen brothers comic genius in this tourist-local cultural-oriented conflict. “Burn After Reading” remains to be the closest to perfect comedy film at least for me from the brothers though this one is of course worth the watch.

5. ”Loin de 16e” Walter Salles & Daniella Thomas

A mother leaves her baby to the public nursery to go to her baby-sitting job.

 Walter Salles utilizes transportation again as a mean of magnifying a distance between two worlds. If you remember his Academy Award winning film “Central Station”, its premise—all roads lead to the heart—is still applicable to this one. Looking too mundane and shallow is my first impression but if you have watched the director’s other films, you will definitely incur more sense about this short starring the stunningly beautiful Catalina Moreno.

6. “Porte de Choisy”

A sales man comes to a Chinese beauty parlor to introduce their new products.

 

Tricky and surreal, it definitely borrows the narrative aesthetic of early French experimental films. Aside from the dazzling cinematography, such as the shot above, the film is rich with remnants of French film history expanding from Post War art movements to Orientalism era and its marriage by the timeless concept of love.

7. “Bastile”

A husband planning to leave his wife learns of her terminal disease and all the love lost through time has been found.

 

A heartbreaker I didn’t see coming, this part is a recreation of love. Unlike the previous shorts which are about the exhilaration of love at first sight, this one is already a dozen of steps ahead. Just passed the stage where love almost died and that is later redeemed by the awareness of a nearing death.  A man in love is a sweeping picture, with this one, when the man possesses the endurance mostly only women can handle and it doubles the empathy the husband is receiving from the audience. Undeniably, it is one of the best among the 18.

8 “Place des Victoires”

A mother grieves for the death of her son finding strength from a transient moment with her son again.

Carrying over the death from the preceding short, this one deals with the after death. Juliette Binoche stars as a mother who just lost his son. The mother is devastated, almost insane, which I am in favor because it displays Binoche’s caliber. The hallucination scene which I always attribute to the French New Wave is a little over-designed, and its transience reflects the mother’s transient recovery from the loss. An almost dying mother in denial, anger, and grief passed all the way to acceptance in just a matter of minutes (whether plot time or running time). That is too hard to have it work in a less than 10 minute-short film.

9. “Tour Eifel”

A young boy tells the love story of his mime parents.

 

The reverence for the early 20th century film French entertainment—pantomimes, brings along the magic of silent films and some American romance films in Paris (Audrey Hepburn films) and the supposed pleasure and cuteness of mimes in modern Paris as told be their adorable son. This film realizes the big cross of vanishing pantomime golden days that their children bear.   

10. “Parc Monceau” by Alfonso Cuaron

11. “Quartier des Enfants Rouges”

A drug user finds a drug pusher supplying her another drug—love.

This short is vulnerably daring as any film with drug-addiction themes can get. I haven’t really seen any movie with such theme that has really brought the subject matter’s darkness into enlightenment. I am not looking at character’s redemption, what I am looking for is a cinematic template that fosters the darkness of drug addiction into a pleasantly consumable experience. “Trainspotting” is not even close; “Manila” is also not, as well as this one.  I don’t think a love story as unceremonious as this one would even reach Step 1. Conversely, the oddness between these two people will be beneficial for the next short and contributes hugely to the over-all coherence of the film. 

12. “Places des Fete”

A rescue volunteer has the coffee on her hands but the man wishing for it together with her just died. 

Absolutely, another one of the best in the roster of 18, this short film is another heartrending one. A volunteer tries to rescue a stabbed man, during the course, the man asks her whether she remembers him making the woman surprised. It cuts back to an earlier scene where the man is revealed to be a janitor in a parking lot where the woman is working. Before the woman finally leaves the lot, the man tries to ask her for a coffee, to bad she is too far already to hear it. With the man humming the same song the day they met on the parking, the woman recognizes him. Back on the rescue operation, the female volunteer asks for two cups of coffee. But few seconds before the two cups of black coffee would come, the man is declared dead.

The flashbacks in this film works good though I don’t think it is already on its 100% mark. Some information could have been placed somewhere else and there is also a POV shot at the start that doesn’t conform to the succeeding shot but even though I have these comments I can’t stop myself from getting drawn to this one because content-wise and structure-wise it is a knock-out. Continuing with the “oddness” I mentioned above, this is the first time I felt that something is done to surmount that mountain standing between two lovers.

13. “Pigalle”

Wise exchange of dialogues, canny similarity and differences between today’s culture and the characters’ culture of their prime years, this one is as witty as most French films are. Except for some weird feelings of being obliged to love the characters and their resentments, this part is generally one of the most French among others.  

14. ”Quartier de la Madeleine”

A traveler sees a vampire and falls in love with her.

This one is a stand-out, combining the famous horror genre and love story with an overflowing metaphor from start to finish. An explorer to Paris witnesses a vampire sucking fresh human blood. He falls in love with her and cuts his pulse for her to suck but the woman vampire seems to care about the guy not to be like her though it is obvious that she like him. Having cut his pulse, the explorer fell of the stairs and loses a lot of blood. The vampire on the rescue bits herself and replaces the man’s blood with her own. Thus, inevitably making him a vampire like her, the two are now of the same kind.

Elijah Wood is a little typecast for this short film but it is a huge delight to see him not a Frodo but someone else. The genre is highly dynamic, so classic with American famous horror genre of the 60s or 70s, German horror films of the Pre-War, and also some elements of Hollywood noir—the insanely red color of the blood perhaps. The film is rich from start to finish I don’t think there is anything in the short that has no use--the stairs he is climbing at the start is also the stair he fell upon at the end, the motorcycle where he hides probably is the victim’s ride. The metaphor of lovers’ difference is their vampire-human difference, and not just that there is an effort to surmount that, this is the first time that such disparity has been gone 

15. “ Pere Lachaise” by Wes Craven

16. “Faubourg Saint-Denis” by Tom Tykwer

A blind young man receives a phone call from his girlfriend breaking up with him and remembers their love story.

This scene reminds me so much of the director’s earlier phenomenal film “Run Lola Run”. I see this part as more of a possible continuation of the preceding short—where they are able to outdo the lovers disproportion but ends up realizing that a romance should be over. The short is fast-paced not only pointing to the intertextual personality of the director he is applying to his film but also because of the ostensibly fast-paced love story between the two. The montage at the middle to late part is very interesting as it significantly coheres to the over-all behavior and bravura of the film.

17. “Quartier Latin”

18. “14e Arrondisement” by Alexander Payne

An American traveling by herself discovers an unprecedented feeling she has never yet felt. 

This part is the main attraction and yes, the best, and the most consolidating of all. An old maiden traveling in her long-dreamt city—Paris, sees the beauty of solitary eating, walking, watching, and living. She walks to places visited by people with companies, eats where everyone eats with family or friends and contemplates the could-have-been in her life. Until one day while sitting on a park with her sandwich, a sudden feeling came through her, a feeling of joy and sadness, of sadness brought by something missing in her life, and for the first time in her life—she feels so alive. That’s the time she knows she has fallen in love with Paris, and Paris has fallen in love with her.

Going back to the beginning of the 17 shorts, this final short has already stopped from looking for someone to love. What makes this one extremely poignant is the beautiful shape-shifting deviation from love with someone to love with something, or to somewhere instead. The short is captured vividly and as alive as the main character’s realization. Nothing less than a chicken soup for the soul, this short film add another groundbreaking definition of the world’s greatest subject matter—love in the location most renowned for its loveliness—Paris.