Round and round we go

Auberge Espagnole director Cedric Klapisch has made another lively ronde of people's stories centered on the French capital and Africans who want to migrate there. Featuring Klapisch regular Romain Duris and a brace of other popular French film actors, including Juliette Binoche, François Cluzet, Fabrice Luchini, Albert Dupontel, Karin Viard, lovely almost-newcomer Mélanie Laurent, Zinedine Soualem and others, Paris will show at the Lincoln Center French series ten days after its opening, today (February 20, 2008) in the city of the title.

If this movie is "about" anything, it's about loving life, appreciating what you've got. If you're just wandering the streets of Paris with nothing to do, Pierre (Duris) thinks, you're pretty darn lucky. Pierre, a dancer, should know. Life tastes pretty sweet to him because he's on his way to a heart transplant and his chances of surviving beyond his mid-thirties where he is now are iffy. His sister Élise (Juliette Binoche), a single mom and social worker, brings her little kids to stay with Pierre, who spends a lot of time looking out his window. Across the way he sees Laetitia (Mélanie Laurent), who soon starts an affair with Rémy (Joffrey Platel), but is also being wooed by a Sorbonne prof and longtime bachelor Roland Verneuil (Fabrice Lucchini), who's brother Philippe (François Cluzet) supervises big new construction projects on the outskirts of the city, is comfortable with his life, happily married, and soon to become a father. Roland is a historian and his subject is Paris. He consents to a do a TV series "popularizing" all that but he loses heart, and his little affair with Laetitia fizzles, and he goes to see a shrink (Maurice Bénichou). Élise shops in a market where she meets Jean (Albert Dupontel)--and there lies another tale: his ex-wife Caroline (Julie Ferrier) still works side-by-side with him, but is now involved with Franky (Gilles Lellouche). And there's more. . . probably a good deal too much more. It's true that playfully investigating a variety of characters, lives, and social situations has always been Klapisch's forte and his passion. But perhaps with Paris his resources and his enthusiasm were too great. There's a bakery where the proprietress (Karin Viard) hires a "Moroccan" girl, Khadija (Sabrina Ouazani, another lovely not-so-newcomer). At one point when we're in an ordinary restaurant with a bunch of people, including Jean, Caroline, and Franky, I started to wonder: what the heck are we doing here? How am I supposed to care about all these different people at once?

It's the filmmaker's way to work with vignettes, the contemporary filmmaker most especially. The trick is making them count, and integrating them together into a successful film. Perhaps because of the presence of Binoche, I began to think of Kieslowski's masterful Red, which is about connections, and chance, and has a haunting immediacy and poignancy Klapisch may be striving for here. Klapisch is a gifted filmmaker and an understandably popular one. He knows how to make us care about people (most of the time anyway); he's great with actors; his camera is fluid; he can make things move. He knows the magic of editing, locations, coincidences. The balance between the wishful enthusiasm of Romain Duris' character and the wit and self-aware foolishness of Fabrice Lucchini makes a lovely contrast that seems at the heart of the film. It was Lucchini in another film 24 years ago who repeatedly declared that Paris is "the center of the world." That may be true. But Klapisch's Paris doesn't quite have a center. His film has too many people who carry too close to equal weight. They force their identity and their situations on us so rapidly it's as if they were holding up a sign. This is the pitfall of the "choral" film: of achieving a brief illusion of complexity at the risk of lacking depth.

Happily, it all ends with a taxi ride, with the driver cursing the day's demonstrations, which are going to tie up many sections of town. Somehow, he and his rider, Pierre, are going to get to their destination anyway. And if this isn't a masterpiece, Klapisch and his top flight crew and terrific actors still arrive at their goal of delivering much to ponder and enjoy.

Tha Africans? They don't make it.

Shown as part of the Rendez-Vous with French Cinema at Lincoln Center, New York, February 29-March 9, 2008.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.