‘Paris je T’aime’ an intimate look at the city

By Jeff Walker
Features Editor

January 11, 2008 10:26 am

— The 2006 film Paris je t’aime looks to discover the Paris, France that lives and breathes beyond the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre; the real flesh and blood that glows beneath the City of Lights.
The movie is a collection of 18 five-minute short films that each take place in different neighborhoods throughout the city. It’s quite a ride through Paris.
In these vignettes we find bickering couples, vampires, down-on-their-luck tourists, cowboys on horseback and Oscar Wilde reappearing beside his grave offering a good sense of humor. An all-star cast of directors offers individual stories that linger with unanswered questions, half-truths and revelations that are happy and sad simultaneously.
The result? We fall in love with Paris all over again.
Highlights include “Tuileries,” a segment directed by the Coen brothers where tourist Steve Buscemi, while waiting at a subway station, fails to abide by a rule in a tourist book to avoid eye contact. Staring at a quarreling couple cross the tracks, he gets gets humiliated by the young man, thinks he’s gotten lucky with the woman, and gets knocked off his feet again, all within a span of minutes. Buscemi plays the part wonderfully with every confused glare.
Others who take part in Paris je T’aime include Nick Nolte, Bob Hoskins, Natalie Portman, Juliette Binoche, Elijah Wood and Maggie Gyllenhaal.
American director Alexander Payne steals the show with his look at another American tourist, who through voice over describes her quiet, melancholy epiphany about life in a bustling Paris park. Living her dream vacation at last, she considers the fine line between being alone and being lonely.
Amid a city full of love and fantasy and yes, lights, Paris suddenly becomes real and seems a little closer to home.
In the Netflix Que looks at recent movies Features Editor Jeff Walker has rented within the past week, as a way of offering different movies for readers to consider. To suggest a movie to Jeff e-mail jwalker@sanmarcosrecord.com.