Go backOur reviews service now comes with an RSS feed so click the icon and syndicate. 
Talote staff recommend lovefilm.com. So click and be happy!
|
20/11/2008
|
Paris, Je T'aime (2006)
|
This collection of eighteen short films brings together the work of a variety of directors and actors. Each segment is set in a different part of Paris and explores an aspect of love, and the emotions that arise from different forms of love. Themes such as loneliness, dependency, lust and grief are touched on in a series of shorts that last a matter of minutes each.
There are some well-known names here, and part of the fun is seeing which director will come next. Paris, Je T’aime includes films by Gus Van Sant, the Coen brothers, Alfonso Cuarón, Alexander Payne, and Gurinder Chadha (among others), while Juliette Binoche, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Fanny Ardant, Natalie Portman, Rufus Sewell, and Elijah Wood are just a few of the famous faces dotted throughout this collection of short films.
Many of the films are great; perfectly-formed little nuggets of cinematic originality, such as Place des Victoires in which Juliette Binoche is the grieving mother comforted by her imagined interactions with her son, and Place des Fêtes which involves a paramedic and a Nigerian man (to say any more would ruin it). Other shorts fare less well, unable to really put across anything profound or memorable within the allotted time. Tour Eiffel, in which two mimes fall in love is imaginative but tries too hard to be quirky, while Quartier de la Madeleine’s vampire tale and Porte de Choisy’s story of mean Chinese hairdressers are downright bizarre, and not in a good way.
The best segment is Alexander Payne’s 14th Arrondissement, the last on the DVD and one of the most touching. Margo Martindale plays an American tourist whose French accent may be painful to listen to, but her deceptively simple voiceover reveals perhaps more than she intends, as she sits in a Parisian park alone but in love with the city itself.
While the release of Paris, Je T’aime is admirable for its celebration of a somewhat ignored art form, it’s hard to see much of a point in putting the collection on DVD. It may have been more suitable to show them on television as a season of short films, rather than lump them all together; watching eighteen short films one after the other is not a satisfying experience, regardless of their quality.
Review by Catherine Leopold
|
|
Our Rating:
|
There are no votes for this films yet.
Please login to rate this film.
|
|
