Paris, Je T'aime

You never forget the first time you see Paris. It’s like a kiss that lingers. Lipstick traces on a cigarette. Or, for Alfonso Cuarón, cause for a mighty sigh of relief. The Mexican director of Children of Men was only 16 when he came to visit his uncle in the City of Light, and its boulevards offered the adolescent transit to freedom.

He’d just been sprung from a German jail after 36 hours, having been held as a suspected terrorist. “I was thinking I was very tough, but when it happened I was crying for my Mommy,” Cuarón says, now laughing as he recalls a very unfortunate case of mistaken identity, complicated by a lost passport and his close physical resemblance to a suspected bomber. “I love Paris!”

Not everyone has such a dramatic anecdote, but it’s exactly the kind of quirky, off-center story that lights up Paris, Je T’aime, a celebration of the city Walter Benjamin once called “the engine room of the 20th century.” Cuarón is one of nearly 20 filmmakers who shares his passion for Paris in this anthology of brief vignettes, each set in a different neighborhood and linked by casual visual overlaps. These segments play on romantic themes that evolve distinctively in this multilingual film, shaped by each directors’ peculiar sensibilities.

The Coen Brothers cast Steve Buscemi as a paranoid American tourist whose worst fears comically come to pass in the Métro Tuileries station. Wes Craven summons the ghost of Oscar Wilde from his grave in Père-Lachaise to rescue a humor-challenged Englishman whose girlfriend is breaking up with him. Cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love) concocts a vibrantly colorful musical in a Chinese hair salon in Porte de Choisy, Tom Tykwer (Perfume) employs his technical razzle-dazzle to accelerate through an entire relationship between a blind student and his American girlfriend, using the streets of Faubourg Saint-Denis as a backdrop.

Cuarón, who signed on to the project when he heard his friend Walter Salles was shooting a sequence, isn’t particularly a fan of multi-director affairs. “They are very inconsistent and you can definitely smell an agenda,” he says, though he reserves praise for ’60s Italian omnibus I Mostri (“The Monsters”). “It’s hard to watch a movie that is episodic. For every good episode, you have to endure five that suck.”

But he was pleased with this cinematic-patchwork version of Paris, which allowed him a chance to explore the ordinary charms of a city whose vistas are synonymous with the movies.

“I’ve lived enough in Paris to learn not to love the landmarks and to love the generic parts of the city,” says Cuarón, en route to London after visiting Disneyland Paris with his daughter. “I love the places that are filled with everyday life.”

Cuarón’s contribution to the film is a single tracking shot that follows Nick Nolte and Ludivine Sagnier along a street in Parc Monceau; an older American and his younger French lover discussing the new man in her life. It’s a tender and wry moment with a subtle twist. “I was always trying to do something with Nick,” says Cuarón. “I’ve been a fan ever since I was a kid and saw Rich Man, Poor Man.”

French director Frédéric Auburtin (The Bridge) hit the jackpot with his episode, set in a café in the Quartier Latin. The story was written by Gena Rowlands and reunites the actress with her old cohort Ben Gazzara, with whom she’s shared the screen in so many of her husband John Cassavetes’ films.

“It’s more than a fantasy; it is a miracle!” Auburtin says. “They are my heroes! If I am a director, it’s mainly because one day I watched John Cassavetes’ films. Opening Night, A Woman Under the Influence, Husbands and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie are my ‘pillow movies.’ And the most exciting thing was that they trusted me totally.”

The exuberant director had a perfect miniature to film: a divorced couple meeting once again, their conversation flickering with both affection and barbed intimacy. Because the actors have a long shared history between them, their scenes crackle with something like truth, illuminated by the vintage Parisian setting. “The gardens of Luxembourg [where I set up the story] are one of my favorite places,” says Auburtin, who lived in the vicinity for three years. “It’s definitely a neighborhood you have to explore by foot. Cafés, bookstores, cinemas, old-period streets, la Seine with le Pont des Arts, there is always a new place to discover. A lot of American people like to stay in Quartier Latin: I guess it is an exotic way to dive in Paris and to break with other modern cities. The Parisians love to stay in it because it’s timeless.”

If much of that Paris has a postcard appeal, the 19th Arrondissement—where the episode “Place Des Fetes” is set—is the part of the city where tourists never venture. “It’s an area of immigrants, traditionally working-class,” says Oliver Schmitz, who focuses on a different strata of city life. “It’s the kind of place you come to as an immigrant when you enter the big city, a bit like Brooklyn used to be in New York maybe. Except here the mythology is part-Jewish, part-commune, part-Édith Piaf, part-modernism. The whole suburb was virtually erased in the 1970s to make way for the new grand vision in architecture and city life. In reality it’s bleak and gray, a setting that could easily be in Moscow or Berlin.”

The director decided to tell the story of a West African street musician (Seydou Boro) who has come to the neighborhood, as Schmitz suggests, with hopes of living a better life. He dreams about a beautiful woman (Aïssa Maïga) he met one night, and through a sudden act of violence—an assault with racial overtones—his dream appears before him. “I wanted to tell an immigrant’s story and also the story of an African with the spirit of Africa and an African French woman with the spirit of France in her,” he says. “The sadness lies in the fact that he is too gentle for Paris—too vulnerable and, hence, the tragic ending. There is a beauty, I think, in the fact that they meet again against all odds. Even though it ends tragically, he got his wish, to see her again.”

Like the most resonant sections of the film, Schmitz’s five-minute sketch is deftly observed: a study in compassion and grace that makes a passing glimpse feel profound. “This movie took me on a journey of discovery with Paris,” he says. “I walked through the whole 19th Arrondissement. It’s a part of me now.”

If the idea of Paris prompts sentimental outpourings from romantics who’ve never even seen the Eiffel Tower or smoked Gitanes while loitering along the Left Bank, it’s not without proper cause. “Paris is one of the great cities in the world for me,” the director continues. “The love thing and Paris, well, maybe it’s a cliché, but I think, ‘Thank God for clichés.’ What better thing to associate with a city than love!”