Paris is a city of light, lovers, art and beauty. And "Paris, Je T'aime" explores all the sides of the city in in eighteen brief fiolms, all set in various arrondissements of Paris, and directed by some brilliantly underrated directors. And they seem to be about love -often it's a person, but each one is also an ode to Paris itself.
A somewhat lonely Denver mailwoman (Margo Martindale) makes her first trip to Paris, and recounts how "I fell in love with Paris, and Paris fell in love with me." A mime spreads colour and mischief on his way to love. Two strangers fall in love in a bar. A medic learns that a dying man is in love with her, and seeking her out inadvertantly led to his death at the hands of a racist gang.
A young boy leaves his misogynistic pals behind, to seek love with a young Muslim girl. A pair of British people visit the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere-Lachaise, an American actress falls for her drug dealer, and a young nanny's dismal living conditions are a stark contrast to that of the people she works for. All these -and more -are intertwined gently in the finale.
But two stand out especially. Tom Tykwer's includes a young blind man (Melchior Beslon) receiving a call from his American actress girlfriend (Natalie Portman). She tells him, "Our spring was wonderful but summer is over now and we missed out on autumn... our love fell asleep, and the snow took it by surprise." In his sorrow, he thinks back to how they met, and how their relationship continued... and gets a surprise.
And Vincenzo Natali turns in a bloody, gothic love story. A young American tourist (Elijah Wood) is walking alone at night, when he steps in a pool of blood. He follows the blood to where a beautiful vampire (Olga Kurylenko) is slurping someone to death -only to have a sudden attraction bloom up between them. When he has a fall, what will happen?
"Paris Je T'aime" has it all -comedy, tragedy, romance, racial tension, religion, vampires, sunlit vacations, glamour and cliches. Okay, there's the occasional dud -"Tuileries," about an American tourist by the Coen Bros., is just lame. But since all the directors are given only about five minutes, most of them are tiny, polished gems without any extraneous material.
Natali's is colourless (except for blood) and eerie, Gurinder Chadha's is shyly sweet and sunny, Richard LaGravenese's is adorable, Craven's is syrupy, and Tykwer's is a delicate web of camera tricks and blurred glimpses. Sylvain Chomet even charms us with mimes zooming through the streets. And each brings another dimension of Paris to life, from lush green parks to bars to the Eiffel Tower itself.
And the acting is just as great -the great Juliette Binoche, Seydou Boro, Catalina Moreno, Marianne Faithfull, Fanny Ardant, Gérard Depardieu, and the adorable Melchior Beslon. Martindale deserves special praise for her sweetly realistic portrayal of an American tourist, and Portman is brilliantly vibrant as a girl who yells a lot. And Elijah Wood turns out a brilliant performance in total silence, managing to convey fear, mischief, eroticism and love.
"Paris Je T'aime" is a collection of little gems, with the occasional dull pebble thrown in -brilliant directors, emotionally charged stories, and great acting. Enchanté!
Directed by a slew of the very best directors (Alfonso Cuaron, The Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne to name a few), "Paris Je t'aime" is a mixed bag of short vignettes about the who's, the why's and the wherefore's of love set in the City of Love: Paris.
As is usually the case in this type of enterprise, the directors with the best scripts and the best technique and vision come off the best. The amazing thing is that producers Emmanuel Benbihy and Claudie Ossard have double-handedly breathed new life in what was thought of as a pretty much dead, at least in its commercial art form entity
...the short film, by assembling 18 films made by 21 directors.
In one of the best and most effective and affecting, "Bastille," a man (Sergio Castellito) on the verge of leaving his wife (Miranda Richardson) for his mistress learns that the wife is terminally ill and decides to stay with her. The main character's wall-to-wall stream-of-consciousness takes us through the whole story in voice-over: "by acting like I was in love, I fell in love with my wife again."
In "14ème Arrondissement," directed by Alexander Payne, a middle-aged American mail carrier from Denver, who diligently studied French as she prepared for the trip of a lifetime to Paris, walks around the city sharing her impressions in voice-over. She talks about her lonely life, the beautiful scenery, her happiness at being in Paris but her sadness at having to experience it alone. But, sitting in a Paris park one day she experiences a sudden epiphany: a life affirming and life changing epiphany that she will without a doubt take home with her to Denver.
Acting-wise, along with those mentioned above, Ben Gazzara, Gena Rowlands, Gaspard Ulliel, Juliette Binoche, Steve Buscemi, and Fanny Ardant...organic, deeply committed actors all make the very best of their short but sweet appearances.
Like its literary twin, the short story, the short film has very little time to make an impression and impact and though there are a couple of miss-steps presented here, "Paris Je T'aime" is as a whole a very beautiful, very cohesive, effective and blissfully thoughtful film.
Buy Paris, je t'aime (2006) Now
Paris is a city of light, lovers, art and beauty. And "Paris, Je T'aime" explores all the sides of the city in in eighteen brief fiolms, all set in various arrondissements of Paris, and directed by some brilliantly underrated directors. And they seem to be about love -often it's a person, but each one is also an ode to Paris itself.
A somewhat lonely Denver mailwoman (Margo Martindale) makes her first trip to Paris, and recounts how "I fell in love with Paris, and Paris fell in love with me." A mime spreads colour and mischief on his way to love. Two strangers fall in love in a bar. A medic learns that a dying man is in love with her, and seeking her out inadvertantly led to his death at the hands of a racist gang.
A young boy leaves his misogynistic pals behind, to seek love with a young Muslim girl. A pair of British people visit the tomb of Oscar Wilde in Pere-Lachaise, an American actress falls for her drug dealer, and a young nanny's dismal living conditions are a stark contrast to that of the people she works for. All these -and more -are intertwined gently in the finale.
But two stand out especially. Tom Tykwer's includes a young blind man (Melchior Beslon) receiving a call from his American actress girlfriend (Natalie Portman). She tells him, "Our spring was wonderful but summer is over now and we missed out on autumn... our love fell asleep, and the snow took it by surprise." In his sorrow, he thinks back to how they met, and how their relationship continued... and gets a surprise.
And Vincenzo Natali turns in a bloody, gothic love story. A young American tourist (Elijah Wood) is walking alone at night, when he steps in a pool of blood. He follows the blood to where a beautiful vampire (Olga Kurylenko) is slurping someone to death -only to have a sudden attraction bloom up between them. When he has a fall, what will happen?
"Paris Je T'aime" has it all -comedy, tragedy, romance, racial tension, religion, vampires, sunlit vacations, glamour and cliches. Okay, there's the occasional dud -"Tuileries," about an American tourist by the Coen Bros., is just lame. But since all the directors are given only about five minutes, most of them are tiny, polished gems without any extraneous material.
Natali's is colourless (except for blood) and eerie, Gurinder Chadha's is shyly sweet and sunny, Richard LaGravenese's is adorable, Craven's is syrupy, and Tykwer's is a delicate web of camera tricks and blurred glimpses. Sylvain Chomet even charms us with mimes zooming through the streets. And each brings another dimension of Paris to life, from lush green parks to bars to the Eiffel Tower itself.
And the acting is just as great -the great Juliette Binoche, Seydou Boro, Catalina Moreno, Marianne Faithfull, Fanny Ardant, Gérard Depardieu, and the adorable Melchior Beslon. Martindale deserves special praise for her sweetly realistic portrayal of an American tourist, and Portman is brilliantly vibrant as a girl who yells a lot. And Elijah Wood turns out a brilliant performance in total silence, managing to convey fear, mischief, eroticism and love.
"Paris Je T'aime" is a collection of little gems, with the occasional dull pebble thrown in -brilliant directors, emotionally charged stories, and great acting. Enchanté!
Read Best Reviews of Paris, je t'aime (2006) Here
This is THE WORST Blu-Ray transfer I have seen yet, merely because there are only Subtitles for The Hard Of Hearing, which destroy the film.
The most glaring offense is the mime scene, which has subtitles!
Simply beautiful movie simply ruined.
Want Paris, je t'aime (2006) Discount?
Those with large-screen HDTVs have something of a dilemma here. The Blu-ray version is sharper and more beautiful to look at than the DVD, but it is marred by excessively large and intrusive subtitling for the hearing-impaired. Subtitling is a necessary evil for those of us who do not have a fluent understanding of French, but those of us with hearing do not need to have every sound effect explicated, nor English subtitles for those bits of this film that are spoken in English. Although the subtitling is larger than it needs to be, I would still recommend the Blu-ray version for those who are not bothered by what amounts to closed-captioning rather than standard subtitling. You're also in luck if you can read Spanish, for which standard subtitles are available.
My aggravation with the Blu-ray subtitling led me to do some research, including the reviews here at Amazon; and I found contradictory and ambiguous remarks regarding the subtitling available on the DVD, which is entirely understandable because the DVD itself is confusing in this regard. To resolve the matter, I rented a copy of the DVD; and the following are my findings, which I hope will clear this up for customers:
If you simply play the movie on DVD without going through subtitle setup, you will see normal English subtitles; however, if you go through setup, you will see only a choice between Spanish and English SDH (or "Off"); and if you choose English SDH, you are stuck with the extraneous and distracting information on screen. The main reason that I am writing this footnote of a review is to say that, in spite of the labeling on the package, and in spite of the explicit choices on the Setup Menu, there are--on the DVD only--*four* subtitle options; to access them you simply have to use the subtitle button on your remote control while the disc is playing. There you will find that you can choose "English," "Spanish," "English," or "Off." That's right: there are two labeled "English" without differentiation, except for one being numbered (on my player, anyway) #1, and the other #3. On my player #1 was English SDH; and #3 was standard English subtitles.
Please understand that I have nothing against providing English for the Hearing Impaired, and the DVD shows that this can be done without rattling the rest of us; I do not know what the constraints were on the Blu-ray that prevented this sensible approach, nor why First Look Pictures chose to hide the standard-English option on the DVD.
One of the things that was unclear to me in going through the reviews was whether or not one needed to buy the special 2-disc edition in order to get the standard English subtitles. Based upon the fact that my rental disc does not say Disc 1 on it, I assume that it is not from the 2-disc set; furthermore, some of the reviews here and elsewhere have indicated that Disc 1 of the 2-disc set is identical to the single-disc edition. I cannot speak for the Steelbook edition, but I would be surprised if the standard-English-subtitle feature had been removed, which I assume would have been extra effort for Steelbook. Thus, I believe that only the Blu-ray edition suffers from this particular flaw, leaving prospective buyers with the choice of a clearer but more cluttered image on Blu-ray, or a fuzzier but less distracting image on the DVD.
Oh, yes, the movie: I found this collection of short films charming, often whimsical, and sometimes wise; and the Paris scenery ain't bad, either. If I were reviewing the DVD, I would give it four stars, but have docked the Blu-ray a star for its clumsy production.
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I knew that mocking the scary movies can be fun, but this doesn't even come close. Total waste of time and money.
