Paris (2008)

To me, this movie is perfection.

Memorable, crazy movie

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

I could watch any film starring the beautiful and talented French actress Juliette Binoche and have seen most of her England-language work, but naturally most of her 40 or so movies are in her first language, including this one from 2008."Paris" is not just a French film, it is a quintessentially Gallic flic. Writer and director Cedric Klapisch makes the eponymous capital city almost an actor in itself with plentiful shots of familiar and unfamiliar locations and typical French spots like the cafe, the boulangerie, and the food market. Also tres Francais is the plentiful dialogue, the existential angst, the beautiful women, the mandatory intellectual, and the odd couplings (although the actual sex is never seen), while Klapisch gives us unconnected characters (Paris is the only thread) and unresolved lives (more like real life than reel life).Binoche plays a social worker who clearly takes her professional work seriously because she is herself a single mother of three children and needs to take time off work to care for her brother (Romain Duris) who has a heart condition that may be fatal. It's all very watchable with social concerns leavened with some humour, but in the end I found it rather indulgent and too loosely worked. Some more narrative structure and drive would have lifted the film from a curiosity to a cur

I just saw this movie "Paris" at my local cinema, and I loved it.You may love it too ...providing you meet a couple caveats. First, you have to like subtitles (or understand quick Parisian French slang pretty well). And second, the medium-fast pacing has to be to your liking. The film is neither impossibly slow nor ridiculously fast - it's just a little on the fast side of middle of the road by today's standards, which may be okay with you. But if you don't like the pacing, the whole film will probably turn you off completely.Several different story lines with mostly different characters proceed simultaneously. They're inter-cut, so we see a scene from one then a scene from another. Sometimes the mixing even switches back and forth before the stories move to the "next" scene, so we see the continuation of the same scene a few minutes later. Every so often two of the story lines will come together briefly, usually bouncing their separate ways again quickly. There's no cutesy effort to bring all the story lines together at once, or to have just one conclusion simultaneously wrap up all the story lines.None of the story lines is deep enough to carry a whole movie (although with different development a couple of them might be); but all together there's more than enough interest to keep the film from being just a travelogue. Each story is a "slice of life," with the story line being the skeleton that adds enough structure to let the characters and events rise above being just amorphous blobs.All the sights are here, but as believable backgrounds to the stories, not as "scenery." If it's in a guide book, there's probably a shot of it somewhere in this movie. The scene constantly changes; without even realizing it, we eventually see all the sights. At one point if you watch carefully and quickly the camera even recreates the view captured on an earlier postcard. Some not-so-conventional sights are included too; who knew that the Paris meat market interior could look like an abstract painting? Academic and theoretical approaches to any "big city" are presented too. But they're presented as just one more way of viewing things; they're not given any sort of precedence or prominence.There's quite a bit of self-reference (although not so much that the device hijacks the movie). The boundaries between "this movie" and "the movie within the movie" are often fuzzed. Several scenes include movie cameras; one early scene even states explicitly that the cameras are shooting the very movie we're watching. The scene with a psychologist can be seen both as straight and as bizarrely bent. It plays on so many levels simultaneously that you may be laughing out loud and squirming uncomfortably in your seat at the same time.Yesterday I watched three old episodes of the TV show Mad Men on DVD, and I'm surprised how stylistically similar this film and that TV show are. Multiple story lines and their characters mix repeatedly and almost randomly. Both forward and backward visual references tie scenes together. Just a few words or gestures often convey an ocean of emotions; if your "emotional IQ" is "challenged," you'd better pay close attention. Production values are very high. The film often looks "casual" to the viewer, but shooting some of those scenes must have been a filmmaker's nightmare. Often events and scenes will build toward a particular "conventional" or "obvious" conclusion, but always something different (often nothing at all) happens. It's as though the film makes a point of yanking our chain repeatedly. And once in a while a story element is clearly stated, but then dropped without further reference.A cynic could see this film as someone showing off that they can include every single trope they learned about in film school. Or better, it can be seen as a thoroughly enjoyable paean to the "City of Light." (One quibble: all the subtitles are presented in the exact same flat beige. When they're against a light colored background -as presented by many of the scenes- they're rather hard to read.)

The film really makes you identify with the characters. It is filmed in a way that not only you get to know them well but feel what they feel. Its well done. I Love Movies that when its over and you are walking back to the car thinking about the film. There are so much we take for granted. So much nonsense we get caught up with. But the truth of it is that you never know what tomorrow brings. Appreciate every single thing we do have and not be so obsessed in what we don't have. Anyway, this movie touches ALL the emotions. Bravo. I highly recommend this film. Hope there is a Part 2 to see the follow up with all. What else can I say besides what is represented in the film is life. The hardships, the difficulties and the confusion but somehow we all survive. Maybe it is family, friends or the brief encounter that gives us enough happiness to carry on. Who Knows?

I was really looking forward to see this film for different reasons: The trailer made it look really heart filling, Juliet Binoche and basically because I love French cinema. So I finally got to do so, but man was I disappointed.It wasn't utterly bad, but basically, for me, it just didn't grab me at any point. Everything and everyone (Each character) seemed so dry, so inexpressive, things would happen and they'd all be like "OH... o.k" and at moments they even seemed to contradict them self's. I don't know, I've seen lots of movies where each characters story is intertwined and some are good, some suck.I've seen it in American, Italian, French, German and even Spanish cinema, so that kind of story telling is not unique in it self anymore and because of that, it's harder to do it, and I think that in this case, seeing how non of the stories needed the other to exist, none of them really coexisted as one and there fore there was no reason to tell them all in the same piece, well it simply wasn't the best of movies, again it doesn't utterly suck, it just isn't as good as it could have been.