A new Jacques Audiard film is always an intriguing proposition, if not a reliable one. Having garnered critical acclaim in the early-to-mid-2000s for French thrillers like Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped, he achieved some mainstream box office success with his next two films, A Prophet and Rust and Bone. He returned to less commercial fare with Dheepan before making an ill-advised detour to Hollywood with The Sisters Brothers, a Western starring John C Reilly, Joaquin Phoenix, Jake Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed that tanked at the box office. With his new film, Paris, 13th District, an episodic drama detailing the sexual entanglements of four young residents of south-east Paris, Audiard has made a compelling return to form.
The film initially centers on Émilie (Lucie Zhang), a young woman in her early 20s who has a science degree from the prestigious Sciences Po but is temporarily working in a telecommunications call center. Whilst she figures out what she wants to do with her life, she is living in an apartment in Paris’s titular 13th arrondissement owned by her grandmother (Xing Xing Cheng), who is dying of Alzheimer’s disease in a care home. For reasons not entirely made clear (she ostensibly does not have to pay anybody any rent) — possibly loneliness, possibly curiosity – she takes in a lodger, doctoral student Camille (Makita Samba). As soon as he moves in, the pair begin having sex, which complicates their relationship as roommates/landlady and lodger. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, 33-year-old Nora (Noémie Merlant) returns to her legal studies at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne after a long time away from academia but is cruelly humiliated when her classmates mistake her for her near-doppelgänger, pornographic camera performer Amber (Savages’ Jehnny Beth). These four characters’ stories intertwine in unexpected, often provocative, but always entertaining ways over the course of the film.
When handling material like this — and, make no bones about it, there are a lot of explicit sex scenes in Paris, 13th District — there is always the danger of filmmakers (particularly male ones) coming across as leering. Audiard deftly steers clear of this sort of territory, which is all to the film’s good, ensuring that the film’s sexual content remains explicit without feeling exploitative. Considering this is a film made by a 69-year-old man, it actually displays a relatively good grasp of contemporary hook-up culture, without feeling like a prurient human safari led by a dirty old man with an unhealthy interest in what young adults are getting up to in private. Smartphone technology and our use of it to mediate our private lives is a key theme, but Audiard and his co-writers, Léa Mysius, Céline Sciamma and Nicolas Livecchi, address it matter-of-factly, rather than despairingly or moralistically in the way that films like Jason Reitman’s Men, Women & Children have done.
On the technical side of things, the glossy monochrome deployed by cinematographer Paul Gilhaume renders contemporary Paris vividly and alluringly, assisting the film’s atmospheric callbacks to mid-period Jean-Luc Godard films like Masculin Féminin and La Chinoise. Whilst the characters run into problems familiar to many people in their twenties and early thirties, the way in which Audiard and Gilhaume make the decidedly non-touristy 13th district of Paris look like a vibrant, exciting neighborhood in which to live and work means that many viewers will find it difficult not to envy their lives at least slightly in places. The depiction of the city here may not be as memorable as that of it in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, but that is an incredibly high bar to meet. Ultimately, Paris, 13th District is an enjoyable and stimulating contemporary drama that sees Audiard back to, if not his best, then definitely something approaching it.
Photo courtesy of IFC Films
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