Movie Rant: Paris, Je T'aime
Jan. 31st, 2008 12:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
awanderingbardSo, I watched Paris, Je t'aime yesterday. It's a film I had been looking forward to since I first heard about it and then seemed to drop off my radar for a while and then it was at the movie store when I went the other day, so I picked it up.
The idea of Paris, Je t'aime is to tell a love story in each of Paris' 20 arrondisements (burroughs), each 5 minutes long and each directed by a different director. The movie actually only tells 18 stories, since two were cut from the final film. The stories are of all different kinds of love - romantic love, dying love, love for a child or for a surrounding, etc.
It was really nice to see how different everyone interpreted their guidelines and as each arrondisement and director came up, to guess what the story might be about if I knew them. Also, the cast is full of really great people - Elijah Wood, Rufus Sewell, Fanny Ardant, Ludivine Sangier, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Gerard Depardieu, Natalie Portman, Gaspard Ulliel and so many more.
There were a couple of segments I didn't like/get. "Porte de Choisy" by Christopher Doyle is completely weird and didn't seem to have a point. I didn't get what 'love' there was in "Quartier des Enfants Rouges" (Olivier Assayas).
However, most of the segments are very enjoyable and unique. "Quartier de la Madeleine" (Vincenzo Natali) is all horror noir about a backpacker who meets a vampire. "Père-Lachaise" (Wes Craven) has the ghost of Oscar Wilde helping a man win his fiancée back. And my favourite one, the last one, is just a middle-aged American woman walking around the "14e arrondissement"(Alexancer Payne) while her recitation of a paper she wrote for her French class back home narrates over it in adorable, grammatically correct but badly spoken French. There is also a gorgeous five-minute one shot camera move in "Parc Monceau" by Alfonso Cuarón that follows two people walking down the street.
So, I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.
The idea of Paris, Je t'aime is to tell a love story in each of Paris' 20 arrondisements (burroughs), each 5 minutes long and each directed by a different director. The movie actually only tells 18 stories, since two were cut from the final film. The stories are of all different kinds of love - romantic love, dying love, love for a child or for a surrounding, etc.
It was really nice to see how different everyone interpreted their guidelines and as each arrondisement and director came up, to guess what the story might be about if I knew them. Also, the cast is full of really great people - Elijah Wood, Rufus Sewell, Fanny Ardant, Ludivine Sangier, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Gerard Depardieu, Natalie Portman, Gaspard Ulliel and so many more.
There were a couple of segments I didn't like/get. "Porte de Choisy" by Christopher Doyle is completely weird and didn't seem to have a point. I didn't get what 'love' there was in "Quartier des Enfants Rouges" (Olivier Assayas).
However, most of the segments are very enjoyable and unique. "Quartier de la Madeleine" (Vincenzo Natali) is all horror noir about a backpacker who meets a vampire. "Père-Lachaise" (Wes Craven) has the ghost of Oscar Wilde helping a man win his fiancée back. And my favourite one, the last one, is just a middle-aged American woman walking around the "14e arrondissement"(Alexancer Payne) while her recitation of a paper she wrote for her French class back home narrates over it in adorable, grammatically correct but badly spoken French. There is also a gorgeous five-minute one shot camera move in "Parc Monceau" by Alfonso Cuarón that follows two people walking down the street.
So, I really enjoyed it and highly recommend it.
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no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 05:15 pm (UTC)Ah, Christopher Doyle. The man has such a wonderful eye for imagery and framing, but he can't tell a narrative story to save his life. I loved his DP work in "Last Life in the Universe", but his directorial debut "Away With Words" was hard to take.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-31 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-02-01 02:04 am (UTC)I'll have to watch the movie before I put my verdict on Doyle's segment, but if "Away With Words" is anything to go by, he loves his imagery and waves a distracted hand at actual meaning.