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Good Letters

eiffel-towerAny project done in collaboration with twenty-one people is almost certain to be abysmal. Joint efforts are hard to manage, unless they’re in name only: a de facto leader and a troop of “partners” who can be told to shut up and get to it. Purpose, focus, execution—all rebel at too much participation, making “consensus decisions” anything but.

So when the function of the collaboration is artistic, and when the artistic theme is “love” in—honest to God—“Paris,” of all clichéd places, the odds of a fiasco would seem assured. Then why is the treacly-named Paris, Je T’aime such a pleasant triumph instead? It bears some thought.

First, it’s not at all what most reviewers say it is: a filmed “love letter” to Paris. If that were the case—with the city itself being the focus—it might have been the failure expected. That is, if twenty-one distinguished directors had picked eighteen different Parisian neighborhoods and tried to glorify them, as if it were they that caused love, then the enterprise would melt and stink. Cities, even those as lovely and celebrated as Paris, are anthropomorphized too much. A city may have given birth to great things, but the things are associated with great people, and events those people caused, which may have brought other greats thither, and so forth; the city got lucky. Instead, Tristan Carné and Emmanuel Benbihy’s concept directs the attention to that somewhat larger theme—love; counter-intuitively, I think that’s why it succeeds.

It also succeeds because this greatest of themes is handled in discrete, five-to-seven minute installments, postal stamp pictures that honor the monumental subject by not attempting too much of it, as though tacitly agreeing that such an endeavor would prove presumptuous. The directors (some better than others) capture—with an amazing lack of redundancy—different aspects of love as it is known to us in the smallest deeds, the most intimate signs: nods, sighs, stares, snatches of tunes, blazes of temper, tribute, sacrifice, loss.

Is it because something so big, posited as the core of all genuine artistic concerns, can always provide material enough, even aplenty? Is it because its myriad facets are sufficient, abundant, for even the briefest of moments, the gentlest of renderings? Because its essence is unfathomable and inexhaustible, is that why so many people—some comically, some tragically, some cunningly—can pull this off without stepping all over each other? Perhaps the light touch is owing to the formal constraints; how much harm can you cause in five minutes? Perhaps in lesser hands there would be more misses than hits. Perhaps something is due to the arrangement—the way paintings are ordered in a gallery so as to benefit all. And perhaps it’s because good stuff made by good folks just gels better. Who can say?

Because the segments are short, I risk spoiling things by too much detail. Plus, the sketches that charmed me—lingering like a well-wrought stanza—might not appeal to others. Everyone should be allowed his favorites in this sort of thing.

So I’ll only ask a consideration of the following, those shorts I found most resonant: Nobuhiro Suwa’s Place Victoire, starring Juliette Binoche (never better); Daniela Thomas’s Loin de 16ème, starring Catalina Sandina Morena (of the superb Maria Full of Grace); Isabel Coixet’s Bastille, with Miranda Richardson; Gérard DePardieu’s Quartier Latin, with Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands; the Coen brothers’ Tuileries, with Steve Buscemi; Oliver Schmitz’s Place des Fêtes (tragically beautiful) with Aïssa Maïga and Seydou Boro; and Alexander Payne’s 14th Arrondissement, in which an epiphanic understanding of life’s purpose transforms a vacationing American postal worker (Margo Martindale), making her love all that she beholds, Paris stretching out before her.

A sequel is planned, set in New York City. May the same lights guide the directors chosen, and the same sense of proportion, of outright respect for that which we are told is the greatest virtue, help to further this exercise. The American Metropolis is as likely a place as any for love to show its many faces, which are in turn likely to be as matchless as the hearts that attend them.

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