Translated material
This is not love
Films about Paris on Moscow screens
The French Film Festival opened at the Formula Kino cinema. Europe" with the painting "Paris" by Cedric Klapisch. The French brought five more films to Russia, but they were not shown in Moscow. Having started in the capital, the festival will travel further to arrive in Vladivostok by December 9, and in Khabarovsk by the 12th, where the program will be presented in full. For now, Muscovites had to be satisfied with “Paris,” which turned out to be quite enough to understand that today’s Paris is not at all what it was before.At the Moscow Film Festival three years ago, Lars von Trier’s project “Images of Europe” was shown. Sixteen directors - one representative from each state - made five-minute films on the theme of a single European space. The project turned out to be uneven, but one episode was memorable. One shot: a large dark shower stall gradually fills with a group of naked people, each arrival has signs of nationality painted on his belly; the task of the characters is to climb under the water and completely wash away all national characteristics; but at some point the water in the shower runs out, people remain in an “unwashed” state and watch how the dirty slurry flows from their mortal bodies into the common drain. The author of this five-minute story was Peter Greenaway. And I remembered him only because director Cedric Klapisch is very reminiscent of such a man with an unwashed belly.
By and large, the world only learned about the existence of the French director Klapisch after the low-budget comedy “Spanish Flu,” filmed with EU money in 2001. His filmography had previously included successful works, but success did not spread beyond the borders of France. With the “Spanish Flu” he hit the bull’s eye: the idea of a united European space at the beginning of the 2000s excited everyone. A cute film about young loafers who came to Barcelona from different parts of the Old World and settled in one apartment came at just the right time. The fresh and unworn faces of the young actors were associated with the collective image of a renewed Europe - liberated, youthful, devoid of racial prejudices. Four years later, Klapisch tried to repeat his success in the sequel to “The Spanish Flu” - the film “Beauties” (or “Matryoshka”), filmed in three European cities - Paris, London and St. Petersburg, but nothing good came of it.
And so this fan of the multicultural world returns to Paris and decides to rehabilitate himself before his compatriots - to make a film dedicated exclusively to the French capital and its inhabitants. The funniest thing about this picture is its title. Well, let’s say, director Zeldovich made the film “Moscow” in the late 90s. Moscow is a strange city with an unstable mythology. Each generation has its own Moscow, for some it is “kva-kva”, and for others “everything in the world is good.” It's more difficult with Paris. This city has a powerful romantic background, on which more than one generation of talented people has worked. It takes a very brave and ambitious person to call your film simply “Paris.” Which can easily appear and say: forget everything you knew about this city, I will show you a completely different Paris, without any “I love you” and other nonsense. Apparently, director Cedric Klapisch is just such a person. Decided to open Paris to the world. No problem. Any normal viewer is like the girl Zazi from Louis Malle’s wonderful film “Zazi on the Metro”: he is tired of looking at the notorious Eiffel Tower, the Cathedral of the Invalides and Montmartre, he dreams of discovering some esoteric hole, climbing into it and calling it the new Paris.
But “Paris” begins not with a hole, but with a majestic panorama of the French capital, from which one gets the feeling of a Sunday excursion to the Eiffel Tower and even imagines the dull voice of the guide. Then the space sharply narrows to a dark room in which two people are talking. One of them is Klapisch’s favorite actor Romain Duris, who plays a sick dancer in the film, the other is actress Juliette Binoche, whose biography includes dozens of such “Parisian stories.” So, the hero is sick and afraid to die. His sister (Binoche), a forty-year-old abandoned woman with three children, does not have enough time and energy for hypochondria. The hero opens the window wide in his dark room and wanders around the city, peering into the faces of people he doesn’t know: a simple cinematic move recently used by another French director, Francois Ozon. As the hero progresses, he meets a depressed vegetable seller, a racist baker, an illegal African immigrant, a successful architect, a declassed clochard, an architect, a student on a bicycle and a professor in love with her... There is no point in listing further: it seems that Klapisch studied the statistics of the latest census when writing the script population - not a single social group is left out in the film.
So, the director offers us a social diagram of modern Paris, a city where no one is happy, and if there are still lovers, then only old professors from the sixties, who are so ashamed of their feelings that they send SMS messages to the object of passion from someone else. “You burn, and your appearance is amazing” - this is the text message a beautiful student receives from a lecturer who is in love with her. After which I want to immediately give up on Klapisch’s film. And not only because there is nothing more banal and absurd than the image of an aging intellectual running “with his pants up for the Komsomol.” It’s sickening that, using the example of this character, the director seems to be showing the viewer what the vaunted French intellectualism has degenerated into, and he’s doing it very clumsily. He also rudely mocks the lack of love in the capital of lovers. And it does not at all subtly analyze complex interethnic relations in a huge, complexly organized multicultural metropolis. It is especially strange to observe all these pensioner equivocations - “Paris is no longer the same, not the same” - performed by a man who six years ago taught young people how wonderful it is to live in a single world without borders, national complexes and cultural prejudices.
In essence, “Paris” resembles a degraded version of “Paris, I love you” - only filmed by one person. This means that it is obviously more boring, because such multi-figure compositions, composed of several short stories and individual plots, are good if they are conceptually connected - as, for example, in “Magnolia”, or in the case when this motley material was shot by several directors with individual handwriting. And here, as a connecting concept, is an open window and the gaze of a seriously ill hero. In short, see Paris and die.
If you still don’t want to die, but want to look at modern Paris, it’s better to go to the melodrama filmed by the French actress Julie Delpy “Two Days in Paris.” The girl, who has long been registered in Hollywood, does not cut off any social layers, does not hire expensive actors and does not set her sights on the whole of Paris. She makes a film about herself - with the participation of her own parents, former and current boyfriends (one of them, actor Adam Goldberg, plays the main role), friends and pet cats. Delpy herself previously starred in two back-to-back American melodramas about “two days in Paris” and complex romantic American-French relationships (“Before Sunrise”, “Before Sunset”). And now she has taken revenge on the American director Linklater, who dragged her into these films, offering a French vision of a similar story about a Frenchwoman and an American in the capital of love. There are no sighs at dawn or kisses at sunset in this version. But much more relevant subjects are involved: an anti-globalist dad, a hippie mom, chlamydia, tight condoms, snobbish Parisian artists and an American psychopath. So when the main character, a Parisian (directly Delpy), says to her angry American friend: “What’s wrong with you, dear, we’re in Paris?”, and he barks back at her: “But it seemed to me that we’re in hell,” the viewer understands much more about the new Paris, and about the new world without borders, and about the new format of romantic relationships.