The ensemble film is the remnant of a dream that the greatest cinematographers have pursued. Alfred Hitchcock wanted to bring twenty-four hours of the life of a city to the screen, Andrei Tarkovsky wanted to tell the story of everyday life in Moscow from a street perspective. What remains is the web of a story made up of many stories that are sometimes more, sometimes less connected – be it through love and betrayal, as in Max Ophüls’ film adaptation of Schnitzler’s “Reigen”, or through an object such as the baroque painting in Otar Iosseliani’s “The Favorites of the Moon”. What also remains is the setting that holds the stories together: the city.
There is a clear hierarchy among ensemble films when it comes to this question. From a wide range of cities that only occasionally serve as a setting, such as Berlin in Andreas Dresen’s “Night Figures” or Hong Kong in Wong Kar-wai’s “The Night” film, two metropolises stand out: Los Angeles and Paris. The City of Angels is the ideal backdrop for the mosaic of American society, in Robert Altman’s “Short Cuts” as well as in “LA Crash”, Paul Haggis’ Oscar winner from 2006. And Paris? Here the history of the European metropolis meets the tradition of its reflection in art. The painters of modern life worked on the Seine, and the cinema continues their work, in Jacques Rivette’s “Out One” as in Eric Rohmer’s “Rendezvous in Paris”, in Agnès Jaoui’s “Lust auf anders” as in James Ivory’s “Affair in Paris”. If Hitchcock’s 24-hour film were ever made, it would have to be set around the Eiffel Tower.
A coffin with its own mobile phone
Marjane Satrapi’s film “Paris Paradise” begins at the Père Lachaise cemetery. The television journalist Édouard (André Dussollier) is recording a new episode of his popular series about people in mortal danger when the cemetery director interrupts him: he has to show him something. He leads the television man to a luxury coffin equipped with a mobile phone, an external camera, drinks and emergency rations. It is his own, says the director, with which he has prepared in case he does wake up after his death.
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The same thing is happening at the same moment in a Paris morgue. Giovanna (Monica Bellucci), an opera singer, opens her eyes and looks into the darkness. To overcome the panic that overcomes her in the icy metal box, she begins to sing. Fortunately, her husband, a conductor, comes to the morgue to see his dead wife. When she speaks to him, he faints.
The ageing diva Giovanna is the secret focus of “Paris Paradise”, and the fact that she is played by Monica Bellucci seems like a promise. Since her brief appearance in James Bond (“Spectre”) and her tour de force with Emir Kusturica (“On the Milky Road”), Bellucci has had little luck with her film roles, so that the crisis of her film character almost seems like a mirror of her own situation. Giovanna’s supposed death, hastily announced by her agent, went almost unnoticed by the public, only the “Parisien” carried a brief report. Instead of a comeback, she is threatening to plunge into complete depression. In her desperation, Giovanna sits down at the piano, but her voice, once celebrated around the world, fails her.
So she seeks solace in alcohol and with her housekeeper, who is struggling with her own family problems. One would like to see how the drama comes to a head, but at this point the ensemble film format takes its toll. There are still so many stories to tell: that of the bullied girl who is kidnapped by a sex offender during a suicide attempt; that of the stuntman who is supposed to perform a risky jump at the Palais de Chaillot but loses interest in his job after his son’s bicycle accident; that of the make-up artist who falls in love with the stuntman; and that of the bartender with whom Giovanna drinks her red wine.
The film gets tangled up in its many threads
Each of these episodes has its own weight, but in “Paris Paradise” they do not support each other as they do in Altman or Haggis, but rather stand in each other’s way. This is because they are neither consistently intertwined nor consistently separated, but sometimes touch and sometimes not, as the dramatic coincidence that is not one dictates. The film, in other words, never really fills the form it has chosen, it just wanders around aimlessly within it.
When André Dussollier reappears because the journalist Édouard has been diagnosed with cancer, and the camera uses his gaze to observe the people strolling along the banks of the Seine, the Paris mosaic regains the momentum of its beginning for a few moments. But then it gets tangled up again in the many threads that it never really brings together, and in the story of the girl who uses her constant talking to dissuade her kidnapper from the planned bloody deed, it even attacks its own character.
Marjane Satrapi, the director of “Paris Paradise”, became known through her graphic novel “Persepolis” and its film adaptation, and as a comic book author and voice of the Iranian diaspora, she continues to enjoy the success she deserves. But her love of cinema is not reciprocated by cinema, and if the failed horror comedy “The Voices” and the kitschy Marie Curie biopic “Elements of Life” were not proof enough of that, her latest film is. Of the many fates it touches on, only a vague memory remains of Monica Bellucci’s face in the morgue. And, of course, of the streets of Paris.
