Modern Art Museum unspools a feature-length love-letter to Paris
This summer has found the Modern Art Museum’s movie house concentrating upon spanking-new imports as a warm-up to a mid-August festival of classic foreign pictures from the last century. The Aug. 3-5 selection is a festival-in-miniature – a two-hour anthology of short films depicting Paris as a wellhead of romance.
Nothing particularly earth-shaking about such a perception, although Paris, Je TÂ’Aime makes for an exhilarating experience. Like most such multiple-director collections of quick-sketch films, this one is as uneven as you please. That is part of its charm, as is the opportunity to catch some favorite Hollywood filmmakers affecting a foreign-film attitude.
The French capital has long inspired such storytelling. Paris drove a hapless Jean Simmons to near-madness in So Long at the Fair (1950), even as it awakened in her an amorous streak and an unexpectedly adventurous resilience. The city, even as a distant memory, revived dormant longings in lone-wolf Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca (1942). And Paris tapped similar qualities in a dour Greta Garbo (see 1939Â’s Ninotchka) and in a gawky Audrey Hepburn (see 1954Â’s Sabrina). Such emotive enthusiasm suffuses Paris, Je TÂ’Aime.
The various directors, many of them contributing original screenplays, approach this mixed-bag assignment with a unified sense of wonder, whether dealing in whimsy or in tragedy. Devotees of the Coen Bros., Joel and Ethan, will find their segment to be a minor jewel with as much sparkle as their more ambitious feature-lengthers Fargo (1996) and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). Wes Craven, best known for his Nightmare on Elm Street horror-movie franchise, proves likewise gifted at farcical romantic tension – with a well-timed ghostly visitation. And Alexander Payne (of the 2004 hit Sideways) delivers a splendid example of his ability to combine snide wit with heartfelt compassion.
The cast includes many similarly familiar faces. The fine seriocomic Steve Buscemi delivers perhaps the most memorable performance, in the CoensÂ’ tale of a tourist confronted with a bracing revelation. Nick Nolte graces a twist-ending tale of an unlikely love affair. Director Tom Tykwer relates a big-surprise episode, with Natalie Portman as an actress involved with a sightless fellow (Melchior Besion) who cannot believe his good fortune. Payne directs Margo Martindale as an American obsessed with tightening her grasp of the French language. Nobuhiro Suwa casts Willem Dafoe as a night-riding cowboy, mysteriously at large in the City of Lights. Alfonso Cuaron directs his segment as an uninterrupted continuous shot, recalling a technique once perfected by Alfred Hitchcock (1948Â’s Rope) and Orson Welles (1958Â’s Touch of Evil).
Anthology films are rare nowadays. Those that have surfaced in recent times – the three-director New York Stories (1989), and the four-director Four Rooms (1995) – tend to become top-heavy with one overwhelming talent, to such an extent that the others might need not have applied. Martin Scorsese so dominates New York Stories with the exploits of a troubled artist (and there’s Nick Nolte, again) that one tends to forget the less assertive contributions of Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. Four Rooms is overburdened with the ferocious zeal of Quentin Tarantino, overshadowing a similarly insistent segment from Robert Rodriguez and lesser contributions from Allison Anders and Alexandre Rockwell.
Paris, Je TÂ’Aime belongs, instead, to an older style of portmanteau film, in which the necessary quality of unevenness tends to add up to a unified vision and a sense of cumulative pacing. Dead of Night (England; 1945) is a classic example, showcasing four directors attached to a set of dreamlike tales that weave romance, comedy, mystery, terror and madness into a tapestry of rare beauty.
And like Dead of Night with its loosely intertwined fables of astonishment, Paris, Je TÂ’Aime deals in seemingly unconnected yarns until a perfectly reasonable finale ties everything together. The new film treats the city itself as a unifying character, consistently lovely throughout though subject to the varying interpretations of its many directors of photography. The musical score, by Pierre Adenot, is a delight.
The directors also include Bruno Podalydes, Gurinder Chadha, Gus Van Sant, Walter Salles, Daniela Thomas, Christopher Doyle, Isabel Coixet, Nobuhiro Suwa, Sylvain Chomet, Olivier Assayas, Oliver Schmitz, Richard LaGravenese, Vincenzo Natali, Emmanuel Benbihy, Frederic Auburtin and Gerard Depardieu.
Showtimes at the Modern Art Museum: 6 p.m. and 8:15 p.m. Aug. 3; 5 p.m. Aug. 4; and 2 p.m. and 4:15 p.m. Aug. 5. (R)
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