Paris vu par... (1965) - film review

Six films, six directors, six views of Paris...

Saint-Germain des Prés – Jean Douchet (18’)
Jean wakes up one morning and wonders how he is to get rid of the young American, Katherine, he has invited back to his apartment.  Katherine soon gets the message and walks out in a huff when Jean tells her he has to fly off to Mexico in an hour’s time.  Katherine can hardly believe her eyes when, a short time later, she finds Jean modelling for a class of art students.  She allows another young man to take her back to his apartment – and is surprised to find herself back in the same room where she spent the night with Jean...

Gare du nord – Jean Rouch (16’)
Over breakfast one morning, Odile and Jean-Pierre, a young married couple, come to blows.  Odile is fed up with the noise from the nearby building site but Jean-Pierre is unwilling to move until his career prospects have improved.  Odile is ready to walk out on Jean-Pierre when, on her way to work, a strange man accosts her.  The stranger offers to take her away, to share with her a life of adventure, romance and passion.  Odile is tempted – but refuses, with disastrous consequences...

Rue Saint-Denis – Jean-Daniel Pollet (12’)
Léon, a timid dishwasher in a restaurant, invites a middle-aged prostitute back to his cramped lodgings.  This being his first time with a woman, he is uncertain what to do – to the amusement of the prostitute...  

Place de l’étoile  – Eric Rohmer (15’)
Jean-Marc makes his living selling expensive shirts near to the Place de l’étoile.  One day, whilst on his way to work, he gets into an argument with a stranger, which ends with the latter collapsing when Jean-Marc hits him with his umbrella.  Convinced he has killed the man, Jean-Marc flees and spends an anxious few days, waiting for the death of the stranger to be reported in the newspapers...

Montparnasse-Levallois – Jean-Luc Godard (14’)
Monica sends a letter to each of her two lovers – one a sculptor in metal, the other a car mechanic.  Thinking she has mixed up the two letters, she visits the two men and tries to work her charms on them – but she only makes matters worse...

La Muette – Claude Chabrol (16’)
In a bourgeois household in Paris’s upmarket 16th arrondissement, a married couple spend their evenings bickering over whatever triviality enters their heads.  Anxious for some peace and quiet, their young son buys a pair of earplugs and finds his life instantly transformed.  He can do his homework in peace and only has to endure his parents’ grimaces, not their heated arguments, at the dinner table.  But he soon discovers the fatal flaw in the old adage "silence is golden"...

By the mid-1960s, there were signs that the French New Wave had all but run its course.  Its leading lights – François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol, had each suffered major box office failures in the preceding years and it looked as if their innovative approach to filmmaking had exhausted its novelty value.  Producer Barbet Schroeder conceived Paris vu par... as a means of promoting, if not re-launching, the French New Wave, at a time when La Nouvelle Vague was beginning to look distinctly passée.

Schroeder’s instinct was (as was the case many times in his career as a director and independent film producer) proven to be correct.  Paris vu par..., a series of six short films each set in a different area of Paris, evokes perfectly the essence of the French New Wave, from six quite different perspectives.  It gives us the caustic anti-bourgeois humour of Chabrol, the quirky anarchy and misogyny of Godard, a witty moral tale from Rohmer, and three engaging short films from some lesser known but nonetheless influential figures of the French New Wave: Jean Douchet, Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jean Rouch.

Whilst the six films are quite different in style, together they form a remarkably coherent whole, representing a style of cinema that is still fresh and engaging more than forty years after they were made.  Each film reflects the personality and approach of its creator and offers a different take not just on the French New Wave but also on Paris and its diverse inhabitants.  The first film – directed by Jean Douchet – is closest to what most people would recognise as a Nouvelle Vague film: an ironic and witty portrait of young love in the Latin Quarter, home to the city’s Sartre-quoting, Galloise-smoking intelligentsia.  This is probably the best of the six films, although Chabrol’s offering (in which the director appears alongside his then wife, Stéphane Audran, looking like the married couple from Hell) is the most memorable, if only for its dark humour and a death scene which is simultaneously shocking and hilarious.

It would be pushing it to say that Paris vu par... single-handedly reversed the declining fortunes of the French New Wave.  However, it is true that in the years following the making of this film, all of the major Nouvelle Vague directors discovered a new lease of life and would continue to have a major impact on French cinema.  Four decades on, Chabrol, Godard, Rivette and Rohmer, are still making films that attract worldwide interest and make healthy financial returns, showing that, far from being dead, the French New Wave is still very much alive and kicking.

© James Travers 2008

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