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Paris Je T'aime (2006)

Director: 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

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From Time Out Chicago

Twenty-one directors from eight countries contributed five-minute segments to this omnibus valentine to the City of Light. As with most anthology films, a few bits are great, a few suck, most are somewhere in the middle and their combined effect is nowhere near as satisfying as a decent feature or well-curated program of shorts.

For our money the best bits were “Tour Eiffel” by Sylvain Chomet (The Triplets of Belleville), which artfully manages to both dump on and exalt the iconically French tradition of mime, and Gérard Depardieu’s “Quartier Latin,” a punchy two-hander about a semiamicable divorce between an older couple played by the venerable Gazzara and Rowlands (who wrote the script). Joel and Ethan Coen’s “Tuileries,” in which Buscemi pays a high price for breaching social protocol on a Parisian subway platform, was good but distracting, inasmuch as it made us wish we were watching a Coen brothers movie instead. On the pointless end of the spectrum is Vincenzo Natali’s “Quartier de la Madeleine,” a murky vampire vignette starring Wood, and Alexander Payne’s concluding “14ème Arrondissement,” which makes lame sport of a plump Midwesterner (Martindale) living out her lifelong dream of a sojourn in Paris. Perched obliquely in the middle is Olivier Assayas’s “Quartier des Enfants Rouges,” starring Gyllenhaal as an actor with a tentative crush on her hash dealer.

Author: Cliff Doerksen 2007-06-15 20:44:21

Time Out Chicago Issue 117: May 24–30, 2007