Paris, je t’aime (**½)

Directed by: Multiple directors
Starring: Multiple actors
Seen: July 15th 2008

**½ Out of ****

18 short films celebrating Paris as the city of love. The beginnings of love, rediscovering love, even endings. And what a celebration it is. Of the 18 films, I found four to be great, and five below par (with one of them pretty awful), while the remaining nine films fall somewhere in between (obviously).

In the first film, or arrondissement, a man sits in his car on a Paris street, musing on how all of the women seem to be taken, until a female passerby faints near his car, and he comes to her aid. And we never hear from them again – there is only one tie-in between the films – Paris is the city of love, and all the stories play of somewhere on its streets.

Now on to the two shorts that I really found touching. The second arrondissement, which is perhaps the most touching of all, tells of three friends sitting on the banks of the Seine, mocking all women who walk by. They laugh especially hard when a young Muslim woman stumbles as she walks by, but the young man gets up to help her, and strikes up a friendship with her and later meets her again. In the 16th arrondissement, a young blind man mistakenly believes his girlfriend (Natalie Portman) has broken up with him, and starts thinking about the signs that he should have seen…

Many of the shorts in between are quite entertaining, from the brilliant 9th, obscurely and amusingly telling of a young boy whose parents are both mimes, to a young man trying to communicate with another, not realising that he can’t speak French. From the strange 4th by the Coen brothers starring Steve Buscemi waiting on an underground station, to an immigrant worker singing a lullaby to her baby before leaving it with daycare, and then taking a massively long commute to work where she sings the same lullaby to her employers baby, and many more.

The awful one, you might ask? Elijah Wood plays a young backpacker who falls in love with a vampires. Yes. I kid you not. A vampires. What?!?!

All in all this is an interesting Sunday afternoon movie (or rather, collection of movies), and will at the very least have you thinking about some of the stories for a while. It is also interesting to note that not all of the stories are of love in a romantic way – but simply about the universal nature of love. Quite inspiring.