10 October 2009

Cri de coeur

Paris

Crit

Yes, this film is aptly named, all right. It's been a long time, but I've seen Paris, and that's what it looks like, and feels like, and all but smells like.

Hey, here's an idea: what if you made one of those everyone's-interrelated movies like Crash or Babel, but instead of welding every single corner to another corner via grotesquely implausible coincidence so that everything holds together like a Tinkertoy skyscraper, you let the connections fit or brush tangentially or just miss, sorta like they do in what we call life? Wouldn't that be a lot better film? Yes, yes it would. And if Juliette Binoche did the funniest striptease in recent cinematic history, that wouldn't be a bad thing, either.

Lots of other familiar French filmic faces in this love letter--wonderful turns by Fabrice Luchini, François Cluzet, and Romain Duris in particular, and kudos to écrivain/directeur Cédric Klapisch, who among other things, knew exactly when to end.

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