La vie parisienne
Jacques Audiard directing a film from a script he co-wrote with Céline Sciamma is one of the biggest-name mash-ups that French cinema is capable of producing right now (they had a third co-writer, Léa Mysius, and the script was adapted from short stories by Adrian Tomine, but from the perspective of the art house movie crowd, it's very clear who the biggest names are here). But it's not one that would necessarily give me any kind of expectations about the results: other than that they're both extremely well-regarded by critics at home and around the world, and both have worked in what can very broadly defined as "social realism" (though neither director exclusively lives there), I can't really say what about Audiard and Sciamma's work might be parallel enough that we should expect some kind of great mind-meld from them combining their talents. And having seen Paris, 13th District, the film wherein that combination took place, does not clarify things for me at all. Not least because it's the least any of the director's projects have felt to me like "un film de Jacques Audiard", stylistically, tonally, or thematically.
And also not least because, to be terribly honest, Paris, 13th District doesn't altogether feel like a finished movie, so any hunt for an authorial stamp has to contend with how much of a first draft it feels. The foundation being three different short stories, it's perhaps to be expected that this feels so strongly like disparate plot threads that have been laid atop each other but never really interwoven, despite what seems like a film-long attempt to do so. Briefly, this is about the sexual mores of a few young-ish people living in Les Olympiades (the film's title in French), a housing complex in the 13th arrondissement of Paris: Émilie (Lucie Zhang), living in economic precarity and stressed out by an ailing grandmother; Camille (Makita Samba), who answers Émilie's call for a roommate, and after she gets over the alarmed shock of finding out that "Camille" can also be a boy's name, they start having sex, before they stop; Nora (Noémie Merlant), an adult who has gone back to university - the same university that Camille has also gone back to as an adult - and Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), a popular camgirl who looks uncannily like Nora, when Nora is wearing a blonde wig.
You can sort of summarise everything that happens to these four people under the umbrella "this is about the sexual and romantic behavior of French millennials", and I'm not sure there's a way to be any less general. There's much that is good and some that is bad in Paris, 13th District, but I think the cardinal sin is that it's so committed to letting its characters sprawl across the screen in all their naturalistic messiness that it neither attempts to "do" anything with their stories, or to try and sculpt their personalities in any given way. By the end of the film, I could tell you a bit about Nora, very little about Émilie, and nothing at all about Camille or Amber, and it's not because the film has made an obvious decision to prioritise them that way. The second cardinal sin is that it feels like it's attacking the subplots without any sort of strategy: for example, Zhang is giving, I think, the best performance in the movie, and as a result Émilie feels like a pressure cooker of emotions far more than Camille or Nora in the first 45 or 60 minutes, but she basically disappears from the movie after that point (it runs to 105 minutes). I don't get a sense that this is meant to tell us anything about Émilie, or about Les Olympiades, or about young people and sex; it really does feel like Audiard and company simply couldn't juggle four characters simultaneously, so when they started to pull Amber in, they jettisoned Émilie to make room.
That's at least kind of forgivable: if Émilie is the best performance and maybe therefore the best character, the best plot is the strange but emotionally nourishing chain of conversations Nora and Amber have as the former starts buying private time with the latter to work out her own ambivalence about being mistaken for a camgirl. The film definitely wants to have something to say about how the young folks mediate their existence through social media and the internet and smart phones and all that jazz, but I think these scenes are the only place where it actually succeeds in doing so. And, to be clear, succeeds brilliantly! As I said, there is much that is good in Paris, 13th District, and the Nora/Amber scenes brush right up into "great". Merlant and Beth are both doing remarkable work playing what must have been some very complicated scenes to execute. Merlant is in some ways doing an information age version of what she was up to in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, playing two entirely separate but necessarily levels of emotion for much of the running time, as she shows us both Nora's suspicion of the whole matter of internet sex work, as well as her fascinated envy with the freedom it seems to offer Amber, on top of having a simple, earnest crush on her new internet buddy. Beth's performance is more surprising, as she has to constantly combine "Amber the camgirl enacting fantasies", "Amber letting Nora into her confidence", and "Amber manipulating Nora" and do it while she spends a sizable portion of her performance not in the same room as her scene partner, maybe not even the same room as a movie camera at all (we mostly see her on a laptop).
That's extremely cool and interesting, and by no means is it alone. Lots of individual scenes in Paris, 13th District are similarly challenging, to the actors and the viewer, though I don't think anything else is quite as good. The film has a sizable number of fairly explicit sex scenes, frank but never pornographic; but they do end up feeling a bit "every French art film about sex", in execution and even more so in how they've been somewhat arbitrarily shoved into the plot (especially the first one, where film indulges for the first and only time in chronological discontinuity). I wouldn't say it's "lazy", but at a certain point, graphic sex scenes in French movies are just as much a knee-jerk impulse as, say, slow-motion explosions in American films, and Audiard doesn't seem to find them very interesting or important; they're just kind of there, taking of space, being all daring-but-not-really.
Similarly knee-jerk: Paris, 13th District has been shot by Paul Guilhaume in very sleek black and white, and I'm at a loss to say why. It gives the whole thing just the slightest sheen of "expensive advertising campaign for a perfume line", creating an air of intellectual removal that's not productive, while also making everything beautiful in a largely flattening way. It all comes from the same thing: I just don't quite feel like the people making the movie had figured out their approach to making it, not as a visual art object nor a dramatic narrative. Sometimes their instincts served them well; often, even. But as a whole, Paris, 13th District doesn't really come together, and must content itself to be less than the sum of its very admirable parts.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
And also not least because, to be terribly honest, Paris, 13th District doesn't altogether feel like a finished movie, so any hunt for an authorial stamp has to contend with how much of a first draft it feels. The foundation being three different short stories, it's perhaps to be expected that this feels so strongly like disparate plot threads that have been laid atop each other but never really interwoven, despite what seems like a film-long attempt to do so. Briefly, this is about the sexual mores of a few young-ish people living in Les Olympiades (the film's title in French), a housing complex in the 13th arrondissement of Paris: Émilie (Lucie Zhang), living in economic precarity and stressed out by an ailing grandmother; Camille (Makita Samba), who answers Émilie's call for a roommate, and after she gets over the alarmed shock of finding out that "Camille" can also be a boy's name, they start having sex, before they stop; Nora (Noémie Merlant), an adult who has gone back to university - the same university that Camille has also gone back to as an adult - and Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), a popular camgirl who looks uncannily like Nora, when Nora is wearing a blonde wig.
You can sort of summarise everything that happens to these four people under the umbrella "this is about the sexual and romantic behavior of French millennials", and I'm not sure there's a way to be any less general. There's much that is good and some that is bad in Paris, 13th District, but I think the cardinal sin is that it's so committed to letting its characters sprawl across the screen in all their naturalistic messiness that it neither attempts to "do" anything with their stories, or to try and sculpt their personalities in any given way. By the end of the film, I could tell you a bit about Nora, very little about Émilie, and nothing at all about Camille or Amber, and it's not because the film has made an obvious decision to prioritise them that way. The second cardinal sin is that it feels like it's attacking the subplots without any sort of strategy: for example, Zhang is giving, I think, the best performance in the movie, and as a result Émilie feels like a pressure cooker of emotions far more than Camille or Nora in the first 45 or 60 minutes, but she basically disappears from the movie after that point (it runs to 105 minutes). I don't get a sense that this is meant to tell us anything about Émilie, or about Les Olympiades, or about young people and sex; it really does feel like Audiard and company simply couldn't juggle four characters simultaneously, so when they started to pull Amber in, they jettisoned Émilie to make room.
That's at least kind of forgivable: if Émilie is the best performance and maybe therefore the best character, the best plot is the strange but emotionally nourishing chain of conversations Nora and Amber have as the former starts buying private time with the latter to work out her own ambivalence about being mistaken for a camgirl. The film definitely wants to have something to say about how the young folks mediate their existence through social media and the internet and smart phones and all that jazz, but I think these scenes are the only place where it actually succeeds in doing so. And, to be clear, succeeds brilliantly! As I said, there is much that is good in Paris, 13th District, and the Nora/Amber scenes brush right up into "great". Merlant and Beth are both doing remarkable work playing what must have been some very complicated scenes to execute. Merlant is in some ways doing an information age version of what she was up to in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, playing two entirely separate but necessarily levels of emotion for much of the running time, as she shows us both Nora's suspicion of the whole matter of internet sex work, as well as her fascinated envy with the freedom it seems to offer Amber, on top of having a simple, earnest crush on her new internet buddy. Beth's performance is more surprising, as she has to constantly combine "Amber the camgirl enacting fantasies", "Amber letting Nora into her confidence", and "Amber manipulating Nora" and do it while she spends a sizable portion of her performance not in the same room as her scene partner, maybe not even the same room as a movie camera at all (we mostly see her on a laptop).
That's extremely cool and interesting, and by no means is it alone. Lots of individual scenes in Paris, 13th District are similarly challenging, to the actors and the viewer, though I don't think anything else is quite as good. The film has a sizable number of fairly explicit sex scenes, frank but never pornographic; but they do end up feeling a bit "every French art film about sex", in execution and even more so in how they've been somewhat arbitrarily shoved into the plot (especially the first one, where film indulges for the first and only time in chronological discontinuity). I wouldn't say it's "lazy", but at a certain point, graphic sex scenes in French movies are just as much a knee-jerk impulse as, say, slow-motion explosions in American films, and Audiard doesn't seem to find them very interesting or important; they're just kind of there, taking of space, being all daring-but-not-really.
Similarly knee-jerk: Paris, 13th District has been shot by Paul Guilhaume in very sleek black and white, and I'm at a loss to say why. It gives the whole thing just the slightest sheen of "expensive advertising campaign for a perfume line", creating an air of intellectual removal that's not productive, while also making everything beautiful in a largely flattening way. It all comes from the same thing: I just don't quite feel like the people making the movie had figured out their approach to making it, not as a visual art object nor a dramatic narrative. Sometimes their instincts served them well; often, even. But as a whole, Paris, 13th District doesn't really come together, and must content itself to be less than the sum of its very admirable parts.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
