Paris, je t'aime

Paris, je t'aime **

Directed by: Olivier Assayas, Frédéric Auburtin & Gérard Depardieu, Christoffer Boe, Gurinder Chadha, Sylvain Chomet, The Coen brothers, Isabel Coixet, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron, Christopher Doyle, Richard LaGravenese, Raphaël Nadjari, Vincenzo Natali, Alexander Payne, Bruno Podalydès, Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas, Oliver Schmitz, Nobuhiro Suwa, Tom Tykwer, Gus Van Sant

Written by: Tristan Carné, Emmanuel Benbihy, Frédéric Auburtin, Jean-Pierre Ronssin

Starring (Due to the massive cast list, I have decided to obmit character names.)
Fanny Ardant, Julie Bataille, Leïla Bekhti, Melchior Beslon, Juliette Binoche, Seydou Boro, Steve Buscemi, Eric Caravaca, Sergio Castellitto, Willem Dafoe, Gérard Depardieu, Julie Depardieu, Cyril Descours, Lionel Dray, Jean-Michel Fête, Marianne Faithfull, Ben Gazzara, Hippolyte Girardot, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bob Hoskins, Camille Japy, Axel Kiener, Olga Kurylenko, Li Xin, Elias Mc Connell, Aissa Maïga, Margo Martindale, Yolande Moreau, Emily Mortimer, Florence Muller, Nick Nolte, Emilie Ohana, Alexander Payne, Bruno Podalydès, Natalie Portman, Eric Poulain, Paul Putner, Miranda Richardson, Gena Rowlands, Catalina Sandino Moreno, Ludivine Sagnier, Barbet Schroeder, Rufus Sewell, Gaspar Ulliel, Leonor Watling, Elijah Wood, Jonathan Zaccaï

116 Minutes(Rated R for language and brief drug use).
------------------------------------------------
"Paris, je t'aime" is an ambitious piece of work, but in the end it fails to generate much of anything. There is a bit of history that went into this film. It is a combination of eighteen diffeerent international directions, some of whom I have heard of and others who my eyes just furrowed in confusion. Each of them directed a five-seven minute long short film about Paris and what it means to them. They pretty much all deal with people falling in love or people observing the love around them. Or even in some cases, just falling in love with Paris. And there are some amazing directors involved here-including shorts from both the Coen Brothers and Alexander Payne, the lot of which have failed to make anything in the last couple of years. Sadly the lot is a mixed bag, with even the best short being simply "ok." The sadness that genrates from the film is not from the emotions of the characters, but the fact that this sure to be excellent experiement failed miserably.

There are eightteen stories, so it is impossible to summarize them all. And all of them run for such a short amount of time that it is redundant to even mention them all. I suppose from my favorites one of them is the Coen's "Tuileries" which stars Steve Buscemi as a traveler waiting for the train. He makes eye contact with a smooching couple across the platform right after reading in a guide book that making eye contact on the French metro should be avoided, and he regrets the eye contact ever happened. The Coen's manage to make a small little dark comedy even though they have five minutes, and it is the most ambitious and clever work in the entire anthology. Another decent one is the one directed by Isabel Coixet, starring Miranda Richardson as a woman who is dying. Her husband planned on breaking up with her to be with another woman and when he finds out that she is dying his plans change. Tom Tykwer's "Faubourg Saint-Denis" is a sweet and sad reflection on love and how it does die away over time. But the emotional standout, for me at least, came from the final short "14th arrondissement", directed by my favorite Alexander Payne. Payne has directed the best film of 2002(About Schmidt) and the best film of 2004(Sideways), so whenever he is involved in a project I stand up and pay attention. Payne has this way of showing loniliness, and also has a way of having one character on the screen doing uninteresting things and turning them into somewhat fascinating. Here he takes his main character, a female, and has her describing her trip to Paris, all with English subtitles as she makes her way through a horrible French accent. Payne's remarkable five minutes put you in a kind of trance, and as the closer for the film you have a good memory of what it was like, but when you remember the foul ups you remember that the film is not really so great.

Among the foul-ups, and there are a many, include a strange film with Elijah Wood as a man that is being hunted by a vampire woman. Not only is this one bad but it is strongly misplaced, and during this entire segment I felt like I was watching a different movie. Gus Van Sant manages to get pretentious as usual and film five minutes of a random man talking to someone that he doesn't know. When he leaves it is revealed that the first man does not know French, and did not hear the other man pouring his heart out to him. Van Sant does what he does best-long shots of nothing that he considers "art."

"Paris, je t'aime" does go fairly quickly, but when each story is five minutes long it is impossible to get into any of them. I could not care about what was happening on the screen, mainly because the scripts did not give the characters room to breath. It is all very rushed. Vignettes were never my favorite way of telling the story, mainly because they are such little ditties that I never get a chance to learn a little but about the characters I am watching. Many of the shorts seem to even give up trying long before their endings, and many of them fail to even tell a decent story. And the final few minutes are ridiculous and unneeded, and there seemed to be some kind of desire to make this something like "Crash," and have almost all of the characters from all other films somehow getting together or walking past each other, or even seeing each other out of the a window. But the main reason why "Paris, je t'aime" ends up being such a disappointment-it is eighteen directors that clealry have some kind of say in this business, but who deliver such a foul product. I was able to get zero enjoyment from this anthology film, and the irony comes from the fact that these men and women love Paris more than anything. If this was their love letter to Paris, Paris would never want to speak to some of them again.