As Far As I Can Tell

On Friday I saw the film Paris, je t’aime (Paris, I love you) at the local Manor Theater a few blocks from my apartment. Although I didn’t realize it at the time the American premiere was also in town a few months ago at the University of Pittsburgh.

The movie is made up of 18 autonomous short stories created by a different directors with different actors. Each represents an arrondissement of Paris (there were a full 20 but two were cut) and are thematically tied together by place and the theme of love. The result is actually quite wonderful and not as jumbled or tiresome as one might expect. The time constraint placed on each director seemed to focus them on making a singular point well, with the bulk of character details left for the viewer to fill in. Like the best short stories, most of the vignettes started in the middle and ended with enough ambiguity for a discussion of possible futures.

Paris, je t’amie plays well within the current trend of micro-format media. These stories would truly work well as a video podcast and I can image watching one per day during a morning commute. The length of each story is similar to the user generated videos on YouTube but the narrative quality and production values remind me more of the advertising experiment The Hire, where BMW commissioned well known directors to create short films staring their cars but with few other constraints. For this film the assignment seemed similarly loose: use the backdrop of a great city to explore the complexity of love between people and with their surroundings.

It’s not a wide release in theaters so look for this one on DVD and if the directors are smart perhaps someday as individual story downloads on iTunes.