Salute Your Shorts: Paris, je t'aime

Salute Your Shorts is a weekly column that looks at short films, music videos, commercials or any other short form visual media that generally gets ignored.

Anthology films have been around since at least 1932, when Grand Hotel won the Academy Award for best picture. It’s only recently, though, that micro-anthology films have become a fad. Previous works had compiled various shorts, but these shorts were rarely less than 20 minutes long and because of this were frequently no less accomplished than features themselves. Even when films themselves weren’t made in this fashion, they’ve sometimes been grouped together simply because non-feature length films have trouble with distribution. For instance, this was frequently the case with Luis Bunuel’s Simon of the Desert and Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story.

But 2007 brought two micro-anthology features into notice, which piled on the number of directors while decreasing each component film’s length. Chacun son cinema premiered at Cannes and was commissioned by the festival itself, consisting of 34 short films piled one after the next from a veritable who’s who of world cinema directors. Much more widely known, though, is Paris, je t’aime, which oddly enough also premiered at Cannes (in 2006) but received distribution in the United States a year later.

The main difference between these two features is not their form so much as it is their purpose. Both show off an eclectic range of cinematic styles, but while Chacon is ultimately about the prestige of the directors, Paris is at its heart a commercial for the city in its title. Because of this Chacon is a lot more blatant about being little more or less than a series of short films, to the point where every DVD release of the film so far has left off at least one of its shorts (most often the Coen Brothers’ “World Cinema”). Paris instead takes these shorts and puts them into a somewhat more traditional framing device that packages them in a certain way, in some sense homogenizing the film but also giving it a unifying structure that works to the film as a whole’s benefit.

The most clichéd criticism for omnibus films was perhaps best summed up by Alfonso Cuaron, one of Paris’ directors, who said, “It’s hard to watch a movie that is episodic. For every good episode, you have to endure five that suck.” It’s a fair complaint, and often a valid one considering that for better or worse most directors seem to view anthology films as places where they can stretch themselves outside their comfort zones without risk of commercial failure. This leads to some unique and powerful works, but just as frequently it means films that just don’t work. But an anthology is more than just the sum of its component parts, it’s also the way the films interact with each other and the central mood created by these links.

Paris is an interesting work less so because of its components, which have just as few knockouts as true bombs, than because of the feeling created when they’ve been so expertly stitched together. The Coen Brothers’ “Tuileries” is a fantastic farce, but this is far more accentuated when it’s followed by the achingly sentimental and political “Loin du 16e” by Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas. There’s also likely more time given to transitions between the shorts than to any of the actual films. This combines with a largely unified score and shooting each short using the same film stock, making the whole package fit together elegantly.

In effect, the unified whole romanticizes Paris far more than any of the component parts do. On occasion this becomes fairly grating, especially due to how much of a product for the city’s tourism department this makes the film into. But they also create a sort of magical, whimsical mood that’s hard to shake off even when your feelings are being so obviously manipulated.

The other cliché when writing about anthology films is to simply dissect each film as quickly as possible, which is no easy feat when considering how many shorts compose Paris. Take a look at the criticism surrounding the film and you can see how this method both didn’t do the film justice during its release and also produced a lot of bad writing, even by good writers with long word counts. Each micro-film really isn’t important enough to change the shape of the whole, which was determined to be airy romanticism by the producers regardless of what each director wanted to do. Even the most irritating of the films, such as “Quais De Seine” by Gurinder Chadha, fly by so quickly that you barely even have time to be annoyed by its PC bullshit.

Paris is by no stretch of the imagination a great film, but it’s an entertaining one and almost revolutionary at times in its own, small way. Because of this, it was quite a disappointment when New York, I Love You seemed to bastardize much of what made Paris worthwhile… and also by remakes something that was once new in such a ham-fisted fashion. While the original had the Coens, Alfonso Cuaron, Gus van Sant, Alexander Payne, and Olivier Assayas contributing, its sequel has, um, Faith Akin and Mira Nair, whose shorts we have some issues with anyhow. Oh yes, and that cinematic luminary Brett Ratner. All we can hope for now is that the plans of for half a dozen more “_____ I Love You” films are canned due to New York’s failure.