Vonia
Paris, je t'aime (English: Paris, I love you) (2006)
Directors: Olivier Assayas, Frédéric Auburtin, Emmanuel Benbihy, Gurinder Chadha, Sylvain Chomet, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen, Isabel Coixet, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Gérard Depardieu, Christopher Doyle, Richard LaGravenese, Vincenzo Natali, Alexander Payne, Bruno Podalydès, Walter Salles, Oliver Schmitz, Nobuhiro Suwa, Daniela Thomas, Tom Tykwer, Gus Van Sant
Watched: 2005 & 8/1/18
Rating: 7/10 Watch
Eighteen
Love stories:
La Ville Lumière!
Bookended by nifty live mosaic,
Stunning city shots- patent in segues.
Directors from
All over
The world,
With
A cast
Both practiced
And new talent.
Best bits by Chomet, Coixet, Cuarón, Twyker, Schmitz.
Mime, "terminal", mother, actress, nurse love,
Respectively.
These were grand.
The rest?
Meh. Tetractys poems stem from the mathematician Euclid, who considered the number series 1, 2, 3, 4 to have a mystical significance because of its sum of 10. He named it a Tetractys. Thus, these poems follow a 1, 2, 3, 4, 10 syllable format, with additional verses written in an inverted syllable count.
#Tetractys #QuadrupleTetractys #PoemReview #Anthology #RomanticComedy
SnoopyStyle
There are eighteen shorts connected by visuals of the city. It comes off as a rambling series of stories. It's more connected by feel more than by story. It's very much a hit and miss concept. It doesn't go completely miss but it rarely hits big. The best is the Coens with Steve Buscemi getting beaten up. It's funny and contained. There are other interesting bits like the mimes. One does get a sense of a nice multicultural city and love is often the subject matter. I certainly would like every short to stand on its own and be award-winning in its own right. It's not and I start to get tired after awhile. It feels a bit repetitive to start anew every five or six minutes. The concept has a problem with flow and maintaining intensity.
Spaceygirl
One of the most inventive pieces of film-making you'll ever see. Spanning some 120 minutes of celluloid, over 18 directors and goodness knows how many actors, it shows nearly 20 vignettes of Parisian life ranging between three and twenty minutes in length. Starring such luminaries as Steve Buscemi, Bob Hoskins, Rufus Sewell, Emily Mortimer, Marianne Faithful, Elijah Wood, Gena Rowlands, Ben Gazzara, Natalie Portman and the always luminous Fanny Ardant it is always interesting. The cinematography is stunning, taking in the city of light in all it's glory. Some segments work better than others. Wes Craven directs a sweet little ghost-story with none other than Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer, who work well together. A well directed, well acted segment involves immigrants from Lagos, another the always good Fanny Ardant and Bob Hoskins play off each other in La Pigalle, a rather risqué area of Paris. Some don't work nearly as well, Elijah Wood as a vampire in a silent segment is criminally underused while Natalie Portman does her usual over-rated over-acting in a boring little piece that I can thankfully skip next time I watch. My personal favourite (predictably) is the contribution by the Coen brothers, who employ the marvelous Steve Buscemi in 'Tuileries'. Mr Buscemi manages to make one laugh without even saying a word. Brilliant stuff! Some-one give the man an Oscar already! "Paris J'Taime" is highly recommended for film and Paris buffs alike.
sandover
And by far. Alexander Payne's segment is a tour de force: allied with the superb Margo Martindale we have one of the most dense, hilarious, sad, outrageously chekhovian cinematic pieces of the last years. Have you seen recently any film that takes dialectics and gives them a heady, exhaustive spin? When Carol in the end proclaims her love to Paris in the mock-signature American way ("I love Paris, and Paris loves me."), which is a take on the way the majority of Americans believe - if one believes polls - that is, in crude terms, "I wouldn't love God if God wouldn't love me back", who does not want to surrender in all the good and bad ways? It is at once an attack on that most unamerican sentence, as Harold Bloom said, by Spinoza "To love God one should never expect any love returned to us," an attack on the European sensibility it may so well - and indeed does! - represent, and yet a most endearing invitation.When I remember this segment, my mind goes to Chekhov's short story "The Darling," whose protagonist Olenka as Harold Bloom, again, said, was "an indictment of the ironic hardness of our own souls." I would claim the same for Carol.When one listens her visit the grave of Jean-Paul Sartre, with an atrocious, hilarious accent, AND of Simon Bolivar (not poor Simon de Beauvoir), one can listen feminism exploding along with any historic sense the U.S. may put a claim on. It is as delicious as any explosion in Bunuel without any of the ambiguities, for Carol seems unstoppable, and we, too, along with her. It is only at the end, when we thought we could rest for a while, that the rest may give us a perilous, lovely pause! Please watch it, even if it is just this segment! It is one of the best of recent years, and a perfect hint on how Chekhov should be handled for on-screen purposes.
AD
