Jardin State.
In the spirit of the film, my review will be in a series of short reviews.
“Place des Victoires”: This is a standard grief-piece: a mother is quickly revealed to have lost her son and is fixating on little details while her husband and daughter urge her to come to terms. While this is to all appearances the dullest of the shorts (though by no means the worst), it features a magic cowboy at the end (Willem Defoe!) and accordingly it really just works.
Bob Hoskins: This guy is great. Like the best character actors he captures the utter cartoonishness necessary to make acting watchable without overstepping into whatever bad comedians are. In many ways he is a better summation of the human experience than a whole funny drama about love and loneliness: he is just too absurd to be believable, just too convincing to be a joke and just too likeable to be criticized.
“Quartier de la Madeleine”: PJT’A doesn’t qualify as eighteen short films since this one is really just part of Sin City. Short. Noir. Ambient. Black-and-white-but-for-stylized-blood. Elijah Wood is even in it. However you felt about Sin City, here’s part of it again but with a heart wipe to black so it doesn’t feel out of place.
(It feels a little out of place.)
Colgate Tartar Control Whitening: I brushed my teeth with this after the movie. It has a granular quality that I find unpleasant. It’s as though in staving off the erosion of my teeth by sugar and age it is in turn eroding them the traditional way. This is an unnerving thing to consider, especially during the only five minutes a day you spend in front of a mirror. I’m not sure toothcare providers realize uniquely introspective window of captive audience.
“14e arrondissement”: The final section is a journal entry by a middle-aged American tourist, narrated aloud in obviously amateurish French. While this is a film about Paris that ends on an American’s experience, it avoids coloring the film as strictly American; in fact ending with a foreigner’s experience of the city feels like a fitting way to give it an identity. The difficulty with this section is the intentional superficiality of her commentary. Lines like “I wish that I had someone with me. Someone to say to, ‘this is beautiful,'” would stand out awfully from an earnest character, but clearly meant to be meaningful and self-aware from a simple, bewildered one. Since the movie knows she is simple it is either being ironic or celebrating it. The former would be mean-spirited and contrary to the presentation of Paris as a beautiful, wonderful place while the latter would embrace all experiences as equally deep, contrary to the idea of Paris as complicated and layered (a problematic thing to suggest about the subject of your movie). I doubt Alexander Payne finds cinematic value in actual tourist slides, yet has seen it in fabricating and producing one. In all, it seems to rest between irony and sincerity: one must simultaneously understand and condescend this poor wonderful woman, or feel not taken the correct amount of seriously.
The Idaho State Quarter: I don’t understand what is going on here. There is a monstrous hawk, giving the entire state of Idaho (disturbingly severed from the rest of the continental 48) the hungriest look. If anyone can come up with a more reasonable reading I’d be glad to hear it but for now I’m going to stay out of Idaho.
Paris, je t’aime: In many ways this movie is exactly what you would expect. It is likeable, funny, sad and visually cool. It is strange that there is a prevailing feeling of optimism in a drama where half the shorts are tragic. There is a sense that the movie wants to make loneliness beautiful simply by showing it, which I don’t fully understand. Any movie about a city is called a love letter to that city, and a brief survey of online reviews show Paris je t’aime no different. In its ambivalence about the relationship of joy, sadness, heatbreak and quirkiness beyond their constant presence it perhaps is a love letter. Of course, a love letter is almost always one of two things: a happy affirmation of the obvious or untimely, unwanted, and unread. To make a film of one seems odd.
1 comment:
Hmmmm. I think there's more to the lonely American tourist. Maybe it's just me, but I found that to be one of the most heart-wrenching, uncomfortable, and pathetic vignettes of the film. It's not just her bad French (great way to narrate, btw) or her optimism that strikes me - it's her relentlessly optimistic and apparently vain pursuit of human contact. The Parisians appear unwilling to welcome her yet she is never entirely excluded (e.g. when the coiffeuse gives her directions to a resto in English). Indeed, barriers (racial, religious, linguistic, temporal, geographic, etc.) are the subject of much of the film. The characters break down or *believe* they break down these barriers. The latter, I think, is more important. The American woman can never fully participate in her love affair with Paris. Likewise, few of the vignettes end with a happy ending; instead they merely suggest it. Yet in every case there is the hope or expectation that the barrier will be overcome, even though every encounter seems tragically out of step. So, even if the film intends to be a love letter to Paris, I think it is only superficially so. There's something about this that makes me think of Derrida's essay on Barthes' passing away... By the time we say "je t'aime," "Paris" has already passed. And we are left questioning whom (or what) it is that we really love. But I ramble...
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