A battle of Arrondisments

So a few months ago, my mother and I had a conversation something like this:

Mom: We're so looking forward to our Paris trip! We rented Paris, Je T'aime. Have you seen it?
Me: Nope. Is it good?
Mom: Oh, it's wonderful. It's such a great Paris movie!
Me: Have you seen Amelie?
Mom: No, but I know that you want me to see it.
Me: Yeah, that's my personal favorite Paris movie, I guess. It's really sweet, you should see it.
Mom: Well, how about you watch Paris, Je T'aime and we'll watch Amelie before we all go to Paris!

Of course, that never happened. My family has a pretty wide lazy gene.

So tonight, almost exactly one month after we left Paris, my parents and I sat down in the basement to watch both of these movies. First up: Amelie.

.....okay, I'm a woman between the ages of 15 and 25. You know exactly what I'll say about Amelie. Aside from the initial "I want every aspect of Amelie's life, every article of clothing, every painting on the wall, every dark red throw pillow", the film is a wonderful whimsical feature, with a romanticized Montmartre as its back round. When my dad asked me what it was about in the video store, all I could reply was that "it's about this girl who lives in Montmartre and it's really pretty and I love it", which is the closest that you can get to the plot description. It's a story not just about Amelie, but the small yet colored lives around her that she watches and influences.

Now, there are three ways that a setting can work in a story. First, it can be there simply by virtue of things needing to take place somewhere. This is the sort of "anytown USA" setting; it's just somewhere to put your characters so that you can focus on the other stuff. The second is the type that Amelie uses, which is when a setting becomes a sort of character in the story, the place makes the characters or plot fit better. In Amelie, Montmartre is a place of artistic absinthine fantasy and childlike joy, coupled with the obvious yet still playful sex trade; we cannot imagine a character like Amelie Poulain living anywhere else, they are so fused together. In the end, Amelie is a cute film, a feel-good film that doesn't make you feel like you had to make yourself dumb or anesthetized to feel good, it's one of the most earnestly happy feelings that you can get from celluloid.

Paris, Je T'aime is the third type of film; one that tries to be the latter but ends up being the former. The film sets out to be a series of eighteen shorts, all based in a different area of Paris, all supposedly about love. Because, you know, Paris is the only place that love exists. What should be happening is eighteen stories that are distinctly and completely Parisian; but what happens instead is that we get eighteen stories that just happen to take place in Paris. I can let that slide, of course; after all, Sleepless in Seattle had nothing to do with Seattle itself, but it still worked as a film. But Paris, Je T'aime is constantly reminding the viewer of where the stories are with transitional clips that focus on the many monuments and recognizable sites, as though to say "hey, pay attention, this is in PARIS. Isn't that CREDIBLE?" Yeah, sure, but the truth is that without the Parisian location, each vignette would be nothing more than a short play put on by high school students (seriously, a lot feel like that). There are several about falling in love in five minutes, a few about long-term relationships, a handful about death or life generally sucking, and a couple that focus on tourism there. Actually, that's a pretty good breakdown of what Paris, Je T'aime says about what your experience in Paris is: you fall in love, your life sucks, or you are a tourist. And the worst thing is that, if you didn't worry so much about the languages used (thankfully, mostly French), then almost every single story could take place anywhere; there's nothing about them that says "only in Paris". It could happen in London or New York or San Francisco or Boise; which wouldn't make it very special at all. This means that, really, the only reason why I'm paying attention to the film is because it's in Paris. It's playing to one of my biggest weaknesses, which to me is a "bravo" coupled with a "fuck you".

The cast and directors were good enough for what they were doing, and there were no poor performances. But on the other hand, it sort of felt like one of those giant birthday cards that someone passes around the office. Sure you'll sign it, but you're not shooting for a penmanship award, nor are you going to impart any words of wisdom in it, after all, it is a giant Hallmark card, and Paris, Je T'aime, for all of it's glitter, is still just that: one big giant Hallmark card en français.

The only short that seemed to resonate with me at all as a really Parisian one was, ironically, about an American tourist named Carol (Margo Martindale) who delivers her narration in completely mispronounced French. Her story is simple; she's in her forties, has no children or spouses, and has always dreamed of going to Paris, so she studies French and packs up to go visit the city by herself; trying unsuccessfully to speak French to the locals who are only too willing to reply in English, following her guidebook that she keeps in her fanny pack to the letter, eating and sleeping alone. She sits in Montparnasse cemetery and thinks about her sister and mother who have died while she sits near the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre, she misses her now-married
-with-children ex-boyfriend as she looks over the city and realizes that she has no one to say "doesn't this look beautiful?" to. Finally, she sits in a park and eats a sandwich, and comes to a realization:

"Sitting there, alone in a foreign country, far from my job and everyone I know, a feeling came over me. It was like remembering something I'd never known before or had always been waiting for, but I didn't know what. Maybe it was something I'd forgotten or something I've been missing all my life. All I can say is that I felt, at the same time, joy and sadness. But not too much sadness, because I felt alive. Yes, alive. That was the moment I fell in love with Paris. And I felt Paris fall in love with me."

The thing is, I remember having moments exactly like that. What seemed to be missing from Paris, Je T'aime was not just that Paris is where people tend to fall in love, but where people have been falling in love for hundreds of years. The beauty of Paris isn't just it's sex appeal, it's the history, the muggy sense that it is a living, breathing organism that can hear and feel you. It is both magical and real, old and new, male and female, full of livelihood and tragedy. And though the other shorts seemed to have these elements somewhere in them, none resonated past their characters. I can tell you that only in Paris does Carol's reminiscence of sadness and happiness and life happen in that way; or if not only in Paris, then in very few places in the world. Unfortunately, most of the film seems to fall into too much of a clichéd set of love stories, held together by the circumstance of being set in Paris.


Of course in the end there's not really a battle between films here. My mother adores Paris Je T'aime, and though I think that she really liked Amelie (she was smiling the whole time!) she just called it "cute", which is still a perfectly fitting compliment. I, on the other hand, would never betray Amelie Poulain, and I lied about liking Paris, Je T'aime.