Paris (2008) - film review

A young man, Pierre, learns that unless he has a heart transplant, he will die within a short time.  The news has a strange effect on him.  He suddenly sees the world in a whole new light.  He settles his differences with sister, Elise, and he takes an interest in all those who surround him.  Suddenly, he is aware of the thousands of lives around him, people he will never know, each one of them a vital cog in the intricate machine that is Paris...

Cédric Klapisch’s affectionate ode to the City of Lights is a curiously melancholic work. It lacks the ebullience and frenetic gaiety of his previous films, films that celebrate life and love with an insouciance and optimism that is all but missing from this latest offering.   Paris is a celebration of life, but in a much more solemn vein, more conscious of the dark forces that inhabit our world, more cynical, more cruel, and more aware of the proximity of death, reminding us how precious and fragile is the thing that we call life.

In common with much of Klapisch’s previous work, exemplified by Chacun cherche son chat (1996), Paris is a colourful collage of modern life that comprises several loosely connected vignettes involving a wide cross-section of French society.  The film does engage to a degree but it doesn’t have the coherence and fun of the director’s earlier films.  The various story fragments not only feel shallow and insubstantial but they also fail to gel into a satisfying whole, and the film feels strangely inelegant and incomplete.

Part of the problem is that several of the story elements are worthy of a film in their own right and are not given the time to make any kind of meaningful statement.  We want to know more about Pierre’s back story, but all we are told is that he is dancer with a heart condition.  The angst-ridden historian Roland Verneuil has the more interesting story but this is compressed into a series of unconvincing sketches that just barely escape being an accumulation of clichés; his brother Philippe is drawn even more vaguely and you wonder why he is even in the film at all.  A muddled story strand involving Cameroon immigrants is even less successful at capturing our attention and feels like the cinema equivalent of a still birth.

At first, the film’s lack of coherence and preponderance of superficial characters is not a problem.  There is enough poetry in the photography, enough panache in the mise-en-scène to distract and reward us.   However, by the mid-point, the magic has evaporated sufficiently for the film’s shortcomings to become apparent.   The endless zapping between the various storylines becomes increasingly bothersome, particularly when we are diverted away from the characters that have begun to interest us.

Although the film has an excellent cast, only two of the actors - Romain Duris and Fabrice Luchini - succeed in rendering their characters believable and sympathetic.  The others - even stars of the calibre of Juliette Binoche and François Cluzet - struggle to make anything of their broadbrush stereotypes and it soon becomes obvious that there are just too many characters, too many stories vying for our attention.

For those familiar with Cédric Klapisch’s work, Paris can only come as something of a disappointment.  It is not entirely without charm - there are some moments of real poignancy and an occasional splattering of good-natured humour.  Yet the amorphous nature of the film, its lack of structure and its thinly sketched characterisation prevent it from having much of an impact, and so a film that had so much promise is forgotten all too easily.

© James Travers 2010

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