Arguably the best line in Tootsie is an inebriated Bill Murray waxing about an ideal encounter with his audience. “I saw your play,” he says in a faraway voice. “What happened?”
When I turned off Paris Is Us, Élisabeth Vogler’s crowdfunded independent film that was swooped up for distribution by Netflix, I turned to my wife and said, “That was incredible. What did I just see?”
Paris Is Us isn’t, I’m sure, the type of movie that would be so square as to have, you know, an explanation. It’s like an 82-minute impressionist painting, a meditation on themes like love, independence, desire and, um, looking gorgeous on the beach as Vogler has her camera aimed squarely at her young, mercurial lead actress, Swiss-born Noémie Schmidt. We first meet Schmidt’s Anna (after a dazzling, psychedelic credits sequence) in a club. Handsome, young Greg (Grégoire Isvarine) approaches her. They connected recently at a party. The music is getting louder. They both admit having popped some mood enhancers. They dance and he asks if he can touch her hair. It’s love!
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We stay on Anna, who is smiling, getting loose, with a bit of a Francophone Emma Watson thing going on. In voice-over, we hear her and her beau talking about romance, and how they’ll always be honest. Then there’s a cut. Time has passed (keep note of his facial hair, it’ll help you figure out where you are in the timeline) and the pair are walking along the Seine, rolling their eyes at tourists. Well, mainly he is rolling his eyes. Men can be so obnoxious. They stumble across a makeshift block party. Then: an argument. He’s moving to Barcelona, and she should come. She’s stopped her studies, she’s working in a café, there’s no momentum in their lives. Reflexively, she says no.
Noémie Schmidt in Paris Is Us
It all has the feel of real life, and part of that is due to how it’s shot. Vogler “stole” a lot of her scenes, placing the characters in the real thrum of Paris and having the actors improv out the dialogue. This amplifies as Anna, alone in Paris (though always flashing back to memories) lets the city’s tides take her to rallies, vigils and even an urban marathon. Though we see the movie “through her eyes” we’re always looking at her face.
We also dip into her head, and there are some associative images, perhaps influenced by David Lynch’s work, as Anna either fantasizes about or intuits a plane crash. Greg may or may not have been on it (it was headed to Barcelona) and it may or may not have been terrorism. (American viewers may have forgotten that Paris has seen more than its share of deadly terrorist attacks in the last few years.) An earlier conversation about Anna’s childhood manipulating the characters in The Sims either means this is a meditation on free will or this movie is actually about video game characters (shades of this year’s Serenity). Or maybe a little bit of both.
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Paris Is Us is a stunning visual collage. As our characters say romantic and philosophical things, we zero in on an ant on someone’s shoulder or the way the light sprinkles through trees. The shooting style plus the emphasis on concerts is a bit reminiscent of Terrence Malick’s Song To Song. Going further back in film history, placing the characters in settings of actual police engagement is a page out of Haskell Wexler’s Chicago ’68 film Medium Cool. But this movie differentiates itself with a patina of the supernatural. Something weird is going on when Anna envisions herself (with a platinum blonde wig) in an empty, old theater.
What, exactly? Well, either it’s arty-for-the-sake-of-arty or its meaning is for you, the viewer, to decide. I’ll choose to be lenient and suggest it is the latter. If you watch the movie and think it’s all phony-baloney, the least you can say is that is very pretty. Paris usually is.
Jordan Hoffman is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, whose work has appeared in The Guardian, VanityFair.com, amNewYork, Thrillist and Times of Israel.
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