August 10, 2008
"I think we grossly underestimate our sorrows, in general."
Almost every single review I've read so far of Dans Paris has described it at least once as a homage to the French New Wave of the 1960s transplanted to the present day. Although I don't fancy being repeti...( read more)tive, that really is the best way to describe this film - as an authentic anthem and tribute to filmmakers such as Truffaut, Godard, Melville or Resnais, and their respective films.
Writer-director Christophe Honoré's film is inspired by both his own family and his deep appreciation for French cinema. Dans Paris is a rarity of a film. Genuinely honest, unpretentious and delightful. Alternately sober and effervescent, heavy-going philosophizing or charmingly simple. It has a vivid emotional realism that is alternately funny and sad, and, at heart, inspirational. Every frame is gorgeously composed and it truly feels and looks and feels like a love letter to the City of Lights.
Honoré reunites the male protagonists of his first and second features - Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard and My Mother, respectively - for his third, and by far best film. Romain Duris (L'Auberge espagnole, The Beat My Heart Skipped) plays Paul, the moody, depressed older brother to Louis Garrel's (The Dreamers, Regular Lovers) carefree hedonist Jonathan. If you add to those two already naturally talented young actors, and following its sincere homage to the French New Wave, veterans Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier as the brothers' divorced parents, you get Dans Paris' first quality: sublime, near-perfect acting.
The film opens with three people in a bed (in a completely non-sexual way) on an early morning in a Parisian apartment; they are Jonathan, in the middle, one of his girlfriends, Alice (Alice Butaud) on one side and Paul on the other. He wakes up, tiptoes his way out of the bed onto the Eiffel Tower-view balcony and then addresses the audience, by looking directly into the camera. Garrel's affable Jonathan proposes to be a narrator in the film's story. Story that starts with Paul's recent life in the country and his failing relationship with his needy, unhappy girlfriend Anna (Joana Preiss). Christmas-time, Paul returns to the family flat in the city, where he takes over his little brother's room and refuses to get out of bed, much least to go out. Both Jonathan and their dad Mirko treat him kindly, but fear that he may go down the same path as his sister who committed suicide during a depression.
Now, I bet that synopsis makes the film sound a bit... depressing. It is. And it isn't. Another one of the many understated qualities of Dans Paris is Honoré's spot-on understanding of depression. Paul's self-exile in the bedroom includes moments of engagement and even humour, providing a multidimensionality to a character who could have easily been just another bore stuck in stagnation. So, while it certainly has a dark, downbeat side for dealing with depression and melancholia, it also has a subtle optimistic and 'less French' side, with the message that anyone who can fall can also pick himself up.
Louis Garrel continues to prove himself as one of the most talented and utterly charming young actors working today. From the opening, with Jonathan addressing the audience, he captures our affection in an almost unfairly easy and effortless way. His approach to life is high-spirited, to say the least. In less than 24 hours - the time in which the film takes place - he sleeps with no less than three girls, but Garrel and Honoré make sure we don't mistake him for a womaniser. Think of The Dreamers' Theo a lot more enthusiastic about life and living in the 21st century. The chameleon-like Romain Duris also shines next to him, delivering a performance of controlled extremes within the domain of pure truthfulness and intensity. One scene in particular, after a suicide attempt of Duris' character, between him and Garrel on a bathtub, is simply jaw-droppingly haunting and powerful.
Honoré's mise en scène makes sure to capture Paris' magic, by glimpses at the Eiffel Tower through the family's windows or the boulevards Jonathan uses as his playground. A lot of things happen in Dans Paris that don't in ordinary films. Songs are spontaneously sung, books read quietly and aloud, and the Seine is jumped into several times. All of this seems quite 1960s. Then again, Honoré's choice to use cell phones as well as a lot of direct film references - including two large poster of Van Sant's Last Days (featuring Garrel's former co-star and friend Michael Pitt) and Cronenberg's A History of Violence - reminds us this is happening now, and places Dans Paris in a wider historical framework. All that said, the personal disconnections and interpersonal bonds the film explores are timeless. Cinema is timeless.
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