Unlike the recent valentine’s card collective of Paris Je T’aime, Cédric Klapisch’s viewpoint of the city of lights distinctly favors a point of view not all the different from that of a child keenly observing an anthill. Although there are some postcard vantage points littered here and there, Paris makes a point of being less concerned with familiar landmarks, and is more in tune with people too busy living life to appreciate it. As witnessed in L’Auberge espagnole and its sequel, true to Klapisch form, the filmmaker loves pitting his set of characters within the confines of a city limit, but he tends to over compensate a lack of narrative with a flurry of personas all clamoring for attention. Basically the depth chart is full of recognizable faces from French cinema, but they overlap with a less than compelling sampling of personal struggles, issues of self-worthiness, ageism and regret.
At the top of the anthill we find a hollowed, fragment of his former self, Gen-X, male protagonist who acts as the film’s antithesis to the sum of the other characters. Forced into an early retirement of sorts, Klapisch regular in Romain Duris’ character spends his days perched at the top of a fabulously located apartment dividing his time by digging through his nostalgic feelings and by appreciating the vitality of life to as far as his eyes can see. His illness makes him a canary counting the days. About one third of the film’s run time focuses on him and his social worker, older sister played by the radiant Juliette Binoche. She acts as the supportive sibling who has had the role of caretaker embroidered into her being. Problem is, these two portraits carry little dramatic weight because the screen time is shared with a demographic friendly sprinkling of all life forms played by prominent French actors. From fish and vegetable market employees, to a wrinkled professor who confides to his younger brother that he has a crush on a student, to an immigrant story of a Cameroonian that feels thrown in for good measure, this collection of mildly interconnected characters only fill narrative voids, and with as many players as there are districts in Paris, Duris’ character is abandoned on far too many occasions.
Not from a lack of trying, Klapisch fails to make a compelling case about seizing the moment, though there is a genuine consistency found in the ballad of slice-of-life portraits that on occasion remind us of the powerful acts as the kindness of strangers, or the quick fusion between members of the opposite sex.
While this is his most mature work to date, with Paris we get about a 120 minutes worth of a screenplay that skips along from one dramatic or comedic number usually finding the middle of intimate moment shared by two beings, but there is no strategic employment of the characters, no thematic cord that brings everything together, but rather chance circumstances that places two people within the same frame. With too many characters as set pieces, hearts are tied up in knots and life uneasy, this is trickle down economics for Parisians set to a nice sound track.
Reviewed on October 1st 2008.
