On French Cinema & Cédric Klapisch’s Paris
As Hemingway once wrote; “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.” This veritable moveable feast of a city’s most influential export since it inspired the literature of, Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Emile Zola, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce and the art of Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali amongst a multitude of other luminaries, has been it’s cinema and succeeding those luminaries of literature and art, Paris next moved on to serve as the base of its legion of cinematic colossi, Jean Renoir, Jean Cocteau, Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Agnes Varda, Éric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jean Pierre Melville, Claude Chabrol, Chantal Akerman, Jacques Demy and Alain Resnais. Like no other city in the world, Paris, through many a century, has symbolised its country’s soul, filled with liberté, égalité and fraternité.
Cédric Klapisch’s ‘Paris’, 2008, a multi narrative ensemble like his similarly engrossing past features, Chinese Puzzle, The Spanish Apartment, and Russian Dolls, finds the filmmaker focussed singularly on the multi layered and deeply emotional characteristics of the film’s titular city, the narrative of the films’s characters are all laid down in its service & support. The film also stands as an admirable amalgamation of all the hallmarks of French filmmaking that has attracted audiences since the nouvelle vague era or even the films of Cocteau and Renoir that directly preceded it. Cinema that projected the daily lives of people, through astonishingly naturally lit, mostly on location, organic cinematography, while dramatically infusing it with the uniqueness of French individualism that has always separated the country’s filmmaking from and influenced the other parts of world cinema.
This individualistically stylistic narrative storytelling of France, cinematic or otherwise found in its literature, poetry and art for more than 500 years can only be matched both in its quality and volume by pre Bolshevik Russia, mostly pre Hitler’s Germany and certain Nordic and East European countries.
As the most important aspect of filmmaking tends to be the people in front of the camera rather than ones behind it, and this is a debate that will probably never be settled either to the proponent’s or the opponent’s satisfaction, I will stick to my beliefs of being part of the former school of thought. Given that, I will now approach this essay through the doors of the thespian’s green room.
Watching French cinema for almost two decades, I have yet to witness (and this can certainly change quickly over time) a more transformational trio of performances in French cinema than that of Jean Dujardin & Bérénice Bejo in Michel Hazanavicius’ ‘The Artist’ and Marion Cotillard in Olivier Dahan’s ‘La Vie En Rose’, couple of films that can be said to have veered from the general mission statement of French cinema as discussed above. Saying that, it is also a fact that no other country’s cinema as a whole has left more of a transformative impact on me. It is difficult to explain why, as a connoisseur of the method of acting that significantly results more frequently in the creation of characters as opposed to a heightened projection of the actor playing the part, I overwhelmingly consider French actors with varying levels of international stardom but a definite sense of familiarity for cineastes, playing mostly ordinary everyday characters with limited or no opportunity for histrionics, the most engrossing in the world. Perhaps the solution lies in the conundrum itself as this can rarely be an issue for non French talent who generally need to transform deeply & completely into characters to achieve the stratospheric levels of legend that is associated with the work of Daniel Day Lewis, Lawrence Olivier, Marlon Brando, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Bette Davis, Christian Bale, Joaquin Phoenix, Sean Penn, Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.
So what makes Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Jeanne Moreau, Catherine Deneuve, Ana Karina, Fanny Ardant, Anne Wiazemsky, Brigitte Bardot, Jane Birkin, Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu and the numerous modern generation of French thespians led by the stars of Mr Klapisch’s film, Juliette Binoche and Romain Duris seemingly non transformative performances belong, in my opinion on the same pedestal with greatest actors of film history?
I believe the greatest French actors posses the magical ability to play varied collection of richly written French characters by doing little more than being themselves.
This is in no way to suggest the absence of hard work on the actor’s part but points more to the richness of human lives in rural, urban and sub-urban France that a multitude of remarkably insightful and greatly talented French filmmakers have been able to match their richly creative and intellectual ambitions with. Given those set of creative foundations to build their performances on, French actors have always been able to mine their boundless life experience based talent to subvert the sense of normality by living up to the subtext of extraordinary depth that their writers & directors embedded their characters with.
You see, the secret to playing a great French character is being a French actor who has lived a creatively and intellectually rich life in France. The language, which I consider to be the greatest in the world, certainly plays its part, but the life and journey that the actors arrive with on set matters the most. The same theory can be applied to Japanese cinema to varying degrees, but it’s that oft repeated French national motto of liberté, égalité and fraternité that seems to run through the veins of the creative community of France, thicker than blood and ably supported by its government in most cases like a constitutional right, that makes all the difference in the end. Empathy and understanding of the French life has helped many non French filmmakers make some of the greatest films from France. Krzysztof Kieślowski, Luis Buñuel, Joseph Losey, Abbas Kiarostami, Asghar Farhadi and Marjane Satrapi being the ones of greatest acclaim.
Just imagine the potential of The Pink Panther franchise if Inspector Clouseau was actually played by a Frenchman in any of the 11 films. Parody and racism often tend to cross streams.
Needless to say, the remaining ensemble star cast of Céderic Klapisch’s film, Albert Dupontel, Fabrice Luchini, Mélanie Laurent and Francois Cluzet perform magnificently in their roles around tour-de-force performances from Ms Binoche and Mr Duris, supported ably by Karin Viard, Zinedine Soualem, Anelise Hesme, Judith El Zein, Sabrina Ouazani with Julie Ferrier and Kinglsey Kum Abang.
The women in the film, as a known hallmark of Cédric Klapisch’s films, represent some of the most organic representation of women in French cinema with a cross section of cultures, tolerance and dispositions. What makes the average educated intellectual woman depicted in French cinema (and one with basic knowledge of French filmmaking can presume that this mirrors French society as a whole) the most captivating and engrossing, is their capacity for empathy. Backed with little glorification or deification of this aspect, the women in French cinema just exist simply with tolerance and courage embedded in them, holistically. Mr Klapisch’s film also shows glimpses of flawed, apathetic and intolerant women in French society, a pan gender characteristic that seems to be far more pervasive than I would have thought possible, even after having my eye opened to the apathy, that a large section of the French society displayed to the cities of the Nazi occupation during Word War II, exposed brilliantly by Joseph Losey in his masterful Mr Klein, 1976. And while the film’s best natured women played by Juliette Binoche, Mélanie Laurent and Julie Ferrier also suffer from their fair share of bad choices and the twin evils of insecurity and misogyny. It’s the way these female characters navigate the consequences that befall them and their sense of indisputable freedom to choose their entry & exit routes of relationships, social or vocational encounters and emotional struggles while courting and understanding their sometimes erratic narrative male counterparts, that make the women of Mr Klapisch’s ‘Paris’, as well his other films and French cinema as a whole, the best representation of unqualified feminism in world cinema.
Cédric Klapisch’s screenplay is filled with ‘Ennui’ in its multiple and often creatively transmutative stages. It is a term often used to harshly dismiss the propensity of the French to accurately identify and experience the depth of their emotions and more often, the capability of their artistic subconscious to articulate those feelings through art in all its forms, but for me, the very existence of the said word in the French language with its match in sophistication in other languages rather hard to find, shows their desire and ability to correctly understand the extent and depth of one’s emotions and its influence on mental health.
The seductive vagaries of the French psyche, consistently attracting Francophiles through art and literature, has been a mainstay of French narrative cinematic storytelling that values human emotions and intellect above all else. Intertwining emotions of love and the insecurities that stem from loneliness, encountering rejection, onset parenthood, cultural upheavals and sudden realisations of one’s mortality as well as those of loved ones, forms the narrative tapestry of Céderic Klapisch’s ‘Paris’, that depicts the beauty of the strength of individualism blending with a sense of fraternity in the city that encourages the expression of one’s social, cultural and artistic emotions the most in the world.
The upheavals in the emotional states of the film’s Parisians are counterbalanced wonderfully by a journey of a man with a singular destination, a life in Paris. He sees the city as his personal paradise. His journey depicted deftly by the filmmaker, grounding his flight of metaphorical fantasy in the truth of his reality while protecting his dignity throughout his travails of suffering, is a brief part of the narrative that has almost the same amount of impact as the rest of the film.
Following emotional quotients, those abstract guides of the subconscious, has a distinct cinematic quality that permeates the best and the greatest of French cinema. Though not always narratively simple to translate, these strong subtextual foundations of the cinema of his country present in Mr. Klapisch’s film, rewards it with boundless depth, presciently weaving its multi-narrative tapestry of relationships as a figurative representation of the soul of Paris.
Arjō Gúptō
