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Saturday, 01 September 2007 06:43

"In the vein of..." has never been a statement that I've found particularly appealing. There are exceptions to the rule, naturally, such as Woody Allen's boundless admiration for Ingmar Bergman or even some of the finer Brian De Palma films that borrowed from everyone. Even when a filmmaker emulates a style as opposed to a person, the results can be quite wonderful (Chinatown, for example). French filmmaker/author Christophe Honoré's cinematic expression appears more-than-subtly influenced by the work of others. His previous film, the abysmal Ma mère with Isabelle Huppert, took the frameline of Georges Bataille's posthumous novella and poorly assumed its position in the unofficial movement of French extremism. His most recent film, Les Chansons d'amour, which played at this year's Cannes, shakily (according to most reports) adopts the form of a musical. In Dans Paris (which he made between Ma mère and Les Chansons d'amour), Honoré creates a conundrum: a film with stylistic attention to New Wave detail, yet embarrassingly unaware of what the movement truly meant.

For those unaware of the New Wave, let me do a quick summation. Essentially, a group of youngish French film critics (notably, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol) reinvented cinema by not abiding by the understood general rules of film, through both style and content. The filmmakers, never an organized group, examined the possibilities of cinema as an art form, particularly influencing American cinema. On its surface, Dans Paris looks and feels of said time. Characters address the camera, conversation rules over action, and, in a memorable scene, one character breaks out in song to his girlfriend, who thus joins him in tune. The film's stylistic traits really depend on your tolerance; I, for example, will take a musical sequence in even the most bizarre of situations but will scoff when a character speaks to its audience. When Jonathan (Louis Garrel) first speaks to the camera, he knowingly mentions the usual distaste viewers have for such a tactic; he serves as the annoyingly cynical narrator for the film's back story, involving the tumultuous breakup between his brother Paul (Romain Duris) and Anna (Joana Preiss, a regular of Honoré's films). We're given visual facts about the couple's crumbling affair, but it's Paul's existential crisis that follows which shapes Dans Paris.

Dans Paris takes place on the 23rd of December, in a small apartment inhabited by Paul, Jonathan, and their father (Guy Marchand). The date resonates with the family, particularly Paul, as it's the anniversary of the middle sister's suicide. Paul has been rendered paralyzed by his depression and spends the majority of the film in his robe and boxers. Jonathan, the younger of the brothers, embodies a particular joie de vivre, taking on strange challenges when not bickering with his father. After being left by his wife (Marie-France Pisier), Mirko, the father, occupies his time trying to understand Paul's woes. The trio makes for a rather motley crew, each person a necessary hassle on the other.

Honoré does find interest in his characters' miscommunication. Characters don't reveal things about themselves and instead let others express observation about them. He forms a rather fascinating balance in this, exposing more about the character making the interpretations than the one who's being spoken about. Paul and Anna's relationship only stands because of this, with Anna constantly torturing herself with outward gestures that make clear Paul's disinterest in her. As Paul seldom speaks about anyone else (other than his dead sister), he remains the mysterious character, clouded in despair (mal au cœur as the French would say), and the constant focal point of everyone else's conversation.

Its abandonment of the expected rules of film replaces itself with noted characteristics of the New Wave. Where the filmmakers of the New Wave tried to break prior expectations, Honoré takes their defiance and turns it into a whole new mode of rules. Though it's certainly a step up from Ma mère, Dans Paris feels slightly ingenuous, especially when dealing with Garrel's character. Garrel's Jonathan is Truffaut's Jean-Pierre Léaud, without the insight. He roams the streets of Paris, by chance sleeping with three different girls throughout the day. His wackiness, and Honoré's embrace of it, distracts. Certainly, Honoré doesn't mind the tonal changes when shifting from Jonathan to the morose and cerebral Paul, but it's in Paul (and Duris) that Honoré has some form of authenticity, and lack of authenticity is where Dans Paris goes astray. | Joe Bowman

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