Artivels Undescribable Perfection

Grimossfer Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

Yazmin Close shines in drama with strong language, adult themes.

Billy Ollie Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

ree-bee103 Like all of Cedric Klapisch's films I've seen so far, this one is a true work of art. It takes it's material directly from real life, all the characters, places, situations are living, breathing insights into the human condition, into life, death, misery, loneliness, love, and so much more than can be put into words. There is no main plot, there is no main character (except for maybe Paris, the city), but all the characters and their lives (even the ones who only appear for a few seconds) are given such attention, that the audience gets an intimate and full insight. Roman Duris is of course incredible as a weak has-been nightclub dancer whose thrilling life suddenly ends when he gets a weak heart and is told the chances of survival are slim. I love how this actor can immerse himself so fully in the mood of his character, he's absolutely at rock bottom, with no future, hardly any present, he is just too weak to be violently miserable, so he is quietly miserable. The thing he gets a kick out of is drinking in the lives of the people he sees from his window. Then there's a good mood kind of day, he sits on the floor listening to music and looking at old photos, and his whole face just lights up (I know it's cliché) when he remembers the past. I don't want to bore anyone and go into all the other characters, the film does it better in several seconds than I could in a whole book, but one that particularly stood out was a Parisian history professor, intelligent and with a sharp tongue he is suddenly faced with emotions he can't battle with words and a quick intellect. A terrific film, as close to perfect as anything is ever going to get.

druid333-2 For anybody who has been following the career of French film maker, Cedric Klapisch (When The Cat's Away,The Spanish Apartment,etc.),this film is a "must see". 'Paris' is Klapisch's love letter to his beloved Paris. Like one of his American influences,Robert Altman,Klapisch's films are ensemble pieces,with overlapping story lines. In this one, we see several Parisian characters who we can easily identify with. There is Pierre,a former dancer,who has learned that he may not have much time left,due to a heart condition. He spends most of his time staring out the window of his apartment,watching life pass by. There is his sister,Elise,who has escaped from a bad marriage,who takes her three children & moves in with Pierre,hoping to somehow cheer him up & try & live with his malady. Other elements include a fifty something historian & professor at the local university (Roland) who has an eye for an attractive student in his class,but is too shy to talk to her up front, so he sends her mushy love letters via text message. Roland's younger brother,Philippe,a well respected architect,who is about to become a father for the first time. Other characters drop in & out of this nicely balanced overview of Parisian life. Klapisch casts his film with the best in French talent that one can conjure up (Juliette Binoche,Roman Dupris,Fabrice Luchini,and the always welcome on screen,Franscois Cluzet). The film's impressive cinematography (with lots of sweeping over head air shots of Paris)is by Christophe Beaucarne. If you got your proverbial groove on with 'Paris,J'taime',check this one out. Spoken in French with English subtitles. Not rated by the MPAA, this film contains pervasive strong language,brief nudity,some sexual content & the aftermath of a horrible automobile accident. Not such a good choice for the little ones (who would probably be bored reading subtitles,anyway)

chuck-526 I just saw this movie "Paris" at my local cinema, and I loved it.You may love it too ...providing you meet a couple caveats. First, you have to like subtitles (or understand quick Parisian French slang pretty well). And second, the medium-fast pacing has to be to your liking. The film is neither impossibly slow nor ridiculously fast - it's just a little on the fast side of middle of the road by today's standards, which may be okay with you. But if you don't like the pacing, the whole film will probably turn you off completely.Several different story lines with mostly different characters proceed simultaneously. They're inter-cut, so we see a scene from one then a scene from another. Sometimes the mixing even switches back and forth before the stories move to the "next" scene, so we see the continuation of the same scene a few minutes later. Every so often two of the story lines will come together briefly, usually bouncing their separate ways again quickly. There's no cutesy effort to bring all the story lines together at once, or to have just one conclusion simultaneously wrap up all the story lines.None of the story lines is deep enough to carry a whole movie (although with different development a couple of them might be); but all together there's more than enough interest to keep the film from being just a travelogue. Each story is a "slice of life," with the story line being the skeleton that adds enough structure to let the characters and events rise above being just amorphous blobs.All the sights are here, but as believable backgrounds to the stories, not as "scenery." If it's in a guide book, there's probably a shot of it somewhere in this movie. The scene constantly changes; without even realizing it, we eventually see all the sights. At one point if you watch carefully and quickly the camera even recreates the view captured on an earlier postcard. Some not-so-conventional sights are included too; who knew that the Paris meat market interior could look like an abstract painting? Academic and theoretical approaches to any "big city" are presented too. But they're presented as just one more way of viewing things; they're not given any sort of precedence or prominence.There's quite a bit of self-reference (although not so much that the device hijacks the movie). The boundaries between "this movie" and "the movie within the movie" are often fuzzed. Several scenes include movie cameras; one early scene even states explicitly that the cameras are shooting the very movie we're watching. The scene with a psychologist can be seen both as straight and as bizarrely bent. It plays on so many levels simultaneously that you may be laughing out loud and squirming uncomfortably in your seat at the same time.Yesterday I watched three old episodes of the TV show Mad Men on DVD, and I'm surprised how stylistically similar this film and that TV show are. Multiple story lines and their characters mix repeatedly and almost randomly. Both forward and backward visual references tie scenes together. Just a few words or gestures often convey an ocean of emotions; if your "emotional IQ" is "challenged," you'd better pay close attention. Production values are very high. The film often looks "casual" to the viewer, but shooting some of those scenes must have been a filmmaker's nightmare. Often events and scenes will build toward a particular "conventional" or "obvious" conclusion, but always something different (often nothing at all) happens. It's as though the film makes a point of yanking our chain repeatedly. And once in a while a story element is clearly stated, but then dropped without further reference.A cynic could see this film as someone showing off that they can include every single trope they learned about in film school. Or better, it can be seen as a thoroughly enjoyable paean to the "City of Light." (One quibble: all the subtitles are presented in the exact same flat beige. When they're against a light colored background -as presented by many of the scenes- they're rather hard to read.)

dbborroughs Pierre, a dancer with a potentially fatal heart disease watches Paris from the balcony of his Apartment.Love letter to Paris is a fantastic looking film (add it to my list of films to have playing on large screen TV's instead of paintings) that didn't connect to me emotionally. Its too scattered a film with lots of people and characters and moments as life in the city goes on. It looks good but by a half an hour or so I was wondering why I was watching when the people didn't interest me as much as the eye candy. Its not bad, and I'm sure had I ever gone to Paris I would have loved it, but as it is too much candy and not enough substance.