It’s been a while since I’ve been fortunate enough to watch an Audiard movie. Paris 13th, (which has a much better title in French), showcases all his verve and style with the expected aplomb as it tells its multi-racial story of what we take to be the new France, or at least the new Paris. Three characters come together in a chirpy love triangle, with both Émilie and Nora sleeping with the charismatic but feckless Camille. The action is resolutely set in the 13th Arrondissement. I tried to think where might be an equivalent in London, and couldn’t come up with one, as even the margins in London are becoming gentrified. A decade ago it might have been Peckham, where I am now, but these days you can’t buy a house for less than half a million in Peckham, so I have no idea. It’s almost as though the city has eaten the poorer suburbs, and one wonders if this might not also be the case in Paris. Audiard studiously avoids any shots with the Eiffel Tower or any other prominent landmark in Paris 13, keen to assert that this is a film about Paris really lives, rather than how it is mythologised. Perhaps more surprisingly, there’s no overt racism either. The second generation immigrants are fully assimilated Parisians now, the multi-cultural society flourishes in a way that the last great Paris banlieu film, La Haine, suggested might never happen. La Haine hangs heavy over Paris 13, which is filmed in an assertive black and white. La Haine in turn smouldered in the wake of the films of the nouveau vague, Paris Nous Appartient, A Bout de Souffle, etcetera. It’s as though all these films have set out to own Paris, to marry their vision of that cultural beast, French cinema, with its most celebrated icon, the city of Paris itself. Audiard presents an ultimately optimistic view of a diverse, sexually liberated society which is still underpinned by the conservative notion of romantic love. Perhaps this is why there remains something slightly unconvincing about the movie. The sex is too well filmed, the characters are too pretty, the surface never feels as though it’s really ruffled. There are too many loose threads and convenient solutions in the script. (Camille just happens to find himself running an estate agents, and when one thinks about the realities of estate agents in this era of housing inflation, the set-up feels scarcely credible.) The notional naturalism, fundamental to a narrative that is so ostentatiously set in a particular barrio, doesn’t quite hold up. (The philosophical sex worker is another unconvincing trope.) Ultimately the film feels too feelgood, too much of an excuse to put pretty bodies through the motions, before they will become middle aged and flaccid and disillusioned. The optimism of Paris 13 might charm, but as a depiction of a capital city in Europe in the 2020s, it feels more Rohmer than Godard, and given the stakes that Audiard flirts with (race, sex, gender, immigration) it doesn’t entirely convince.
No comments:
Post a Comment