Paris, je t’aime is a French anthology film from last year that is finally making the art house circuit in the United States. And for all intents and purposes, it was financed by the Paris Boosters Society (Le Societé du boostiers du Paris), as even the grimiest of its 18 segments, such as the one about a mugging, or the tale of a female vampire taking a new victim, serve to glamorize the already world capital of glamor. What’s wrong, has tourism been down? Has American hatred of all things French finally had its impact? Have Freedom Fries finally conquered French Fries?

For the most part, these short segments come across like either piss poor Chanel perfume ads or the sort of bad short films that even get hooted off YouTube. Take the first one, “Montmartre,” credited to Bruno Podalydes (one of numerous directors asked to participate that I happen not to have heard of). A lonely guy finally finds a parking lot, and then helps a woman who has stumbled on the street near his car. Love blooms. Clearly the point is that Paris is a petrie dish of romance, so come on down!

On the other hand, segments such as “Tuileries,” credited to the Coen Brothers, come across like Hostel Lite, in this case a cautionary tale of the bad side of tourism as Steve Buscemi is shown abused by a scary couple and a twerp with a pea shooter in a subway station. A segment with Juliette Binoche, directed by Nobuhiro Suwa (“Place des Victoires”), concerns a woman grieving over her dead son (who is presumably taken to heaven by God, who arrives in the form of Willem Defoe as a mounted cowboy). Drug use is rife in Olivier Assayas’s “Quartier des Enfants Rouges,” with Maggie Gyllenhaal as an actress trying to get through an historical epic with the obliterating crutch of dope, even just hours before going to the set, perhaps an homage to recent historical films made in France, or to the American obsession with the doings of young celebrities.

Though mostly knocked off, segments by some of the directors, such as Gus Van Sant, are instantly identifiable, if only they revisit boring old obsessions (though at least Van Sant’s film has something akin to a comic, Maupassant punchline). Tom Tykwer’s segment, “Faubourg Saint-Denis” with Natalie Portman, looks like its going in the Run Lola Run direction, before digressing into the most heavily edited of the shorts. Others seem to bear no resemblance to the director’s earlier work, such as Wes Craven’s “Pere-Lachaise,” in which (oddly) the ghost of Oscar Wilde helps save a young man’s marriage (Rufus Sewell and Emily Mortimer play the pair). “Loin du 16ème,” credited to Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas, makes a less than subtle political point. The nadir of the whole enterprise is a story about, yes, God help us, mimes.

Inevitably, the viewer turns such omnibi films into horse races. One sifts and weighs directors against the very each other against the communal spirit of the enterprise, if only out of boredom (it is amazing how quickly, in mere seconds, it takes for a short film to bore you). Though I got a kick out of the Coen Brothers segment, if only for its visual acuity, the best segment belongs to Alexander Payne. His “14th arrondissement” starts out, as do all of his films, as if it is going to ridicule ordinary people, in this case Margo Martindale as a lonely postal employee on solo vacation in Paris, whose voice over, in accent-free French, constitutes her French language class report. It’s beautifully done, takes you unawares, and says a lot in a short amount of time.

In the end, Paris, je t’aime, which seems to be generally supervised by Tristan Carné and Emmanuel Benbihy, makes a vague effort to connect some of the short subjects, and also to reassure us that all those scary segments shouldn’t be taken seriously (vampire victim Elijah Wood isn’t “really” dead, it turns out!). What’s weird is how little the film feels like “Paris.” The Coen Brothers segment, for example, could have taken place in London or Manhattan. And “love” is “universal,” not solely product of the City of Lights. I could imagine something funny coming out of a blending of The Red Balloon with Breathless and Tintin: that might have provided a caricaturally Parisian feel. But maybe “Paris,” both literally and imaginatively, cannot be caught in a two or three minute segment. After all, it took Bernardo Bertolucci two full length feature films to isolate his own feelings and observations about the city. Apparently, 12-odd Frenchmen and their international acolytes can be wrong.

Comments: None