Thursday, March 10, 2011

What I Watched -- Paris

I just mentioned how much I love Juliette Binoche, so I'm going to go back and try to reconstruct comments about a movie I saw of hers which I apparently neglected to write about.

The movie is Paris, and I watched it when I was on my kick of movies about that city.  It's the story of a brother (Romain Duris) and sister (Juliette Binoche); he is a professional dancer with a terminal heart condition, she moves into his apartment with her three children to care for him.  That seems to spell disaster, but somehow it doesn't.  Pierre's illness has made him introspective - he spends a lot of time watching the lives of passersby from his balcony - and Elise needs the company of an adult.

Through them, you meet other Parisians, and learn the stories of several individual lives.  The movie is a bit disjointed in that regard; it feels more like a collection of short films than a single feature-length picture.  There isn't the feel-good sense that all the characters are in this rat race together, like there is at the end of Love Actually.  Instead, they are just people struggling with their own lives.  Their stories do connect in small ways, but that's hardly the point.

Rather, the point is Paris.  The movie is an unapologetic appreciation of the city, and the people who live in it, while perhaps interesting, are almost incidental.

Bottom line: a lovely movie.  Not unhappy, but not one to cheer you up either.

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