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Parisian Love Stories for the Age of Talk Less, Message More
Jacques Audiard made his new film “Paris, 13th District” as a counterpoint to the New Wave movies that shaped his early ideas of love and intimacy.
"Midway through “Paris, 13th District,” the new film directed by Jacques Audiard, Émilie sneaks away from her job waitressing in a Chinese restaurant to hook up with a man she’s found on a dating app. When she returns from the encounter, she is so filled with happiness that she dances through the aisles as the customers applaud.
It’s a joyful moment among the tumultuous stories of love and sex Audiard weaves together to form a distinctly contemporary picture of Parisian romance. The young characters, including Émilie, fall into bed with new partners after barely speaking and live in high-rises that look like they could be in Mexico City or Seattle. Neither the Eiffel Tower nor the Notre-Dame cathedral make an appearance.
“I wanted to examine the state of the modern romantic discourse,” Audiard, 69, said in a recent video interview, adding that the subject “is often judged in a negative, maybe reactionary way by people from my generation, that for young people doesn’t make any sense.”
“The film really marked me,” Audiard said, arguing that it had served as a romantic education for him and other young people about how to use words as a mode of seduction. But he said that he believed the discourse had now shifted. “There’s now the principle that people will have sex immediately, and I wanted to see what possibilities come afterward,” he said. . .
Audiard co-wrote the screenplay for “Paris, 13th District” with the directors Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Petite Maman”) and Léa Mysius.
The film, which is loosely adapted from three stories by the American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, takes its title from its setting in the Olympiads, a neighborhood of high-rises and walkways in the southeast of Paris that was built as an urban renewal project in the 1960s.
Tomine said in a recent interview he had been “flattered” that his stories, which he described as “very California,” had proved adaptable to a contemporary French context and that they “have universal qualities that I had not been aware of.”
By setting the film among the Olympiads’ modernist architecture, Audiard said, and shooting it in black and white, he aimed to reinforce the sense that he was telling a different kind of story set in the French capital. “I wanted to create a distance from the romantic Paris you know,” he said, explaining that he saw the city’s historical center as a kind of “museum.”
. . .
Tomine, whose graphic novels have drawn widespread acclaim for their subtle depictions of urban disconnection, said he admired the decision to emphasize smartphones and computer screens, which was absent from his stories. He said he had also been pleased by the film’s nonjudgmental approach to the subject, especially given that, “you know, Jacques is an older gentleman.”
Aside from the superficial modifications that had been made to adapt it to Paris, he said, the most noteworthy change in the adaptation had been a shift away from his stories’ gloomier tone. “I feel like the film portrays a lot more intimacy, connection and sex than the books,” he added.
A more “cynical” filmmaker than Audiard would have portrayed technology as “isolating,” Tomine said, noting that “it’s almost a daring artistic choice to have it move toward actual romance and connection.”
“It’s a pretty optimistic film,” he added.
Reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/20/movies/paris-13th-district.html
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The film Putin doesn’t want the world to see: Firebird, a gay love story about fighter pilots
It has been accused of ‘shaming Moscow’ and ‘punching the Russian soldier in the face’. But the makers of this powerful drama about dogfights and dangerous desires refuse to be silenced
Oleg Zagorodnii is sitting in the cafe he owns in Kyiv, beneath a brightly coloured painting of Aladdin smiling down from the wall behind. “It is just me now, no baristas,” says the Ukrainian actor via video call. “People come. I make them coffee, give them dessert. They are happy to feel some kind of normal life. They sit in the cafe, we play music, we speak. Of course, all we talk about is war.”
Zagorodnii has twice attempted to enlist in the army, only to be told that there are currently more volunteers than equipment. The best he can do is make appeals on social media for bulletproof vests, and use the cafe as a place to pass on food, supplies and military uniforms. “I try to do what I can in this terrible time,” he says.
It was only a year ago that the 34-year-old rented a small cinema in the city to screen the cold war love story Firebird for his family and friends. In this stirring British-Estonian production, Zagorodnii, who has the looks of a 1940s matinee idol, stars as Roman, a soon-to-be-married fighter pilot who falls for a young conscript, Sergey, played by Britain’s Tom Prior, after they meet at a military base in Soviet-occupied 1970s Estonia. Based on the autobiography of the late Sergey Fetisov, Firebird might resemble any tale of forbidden desire – except that Sergey and Roman face more than simply scandal should their relationship be discovered. The Soviet-era setting lends the film a distinctive thriller element: think of it as The Love Lives of Others...
He and Rebane travelled to Moscow in 2016 to meet Fetisov, finding his company every bit as joyful as his prose. “Some of the people who were closest to him didn’t know his story,” says Prior. “He certainly wasn’t ashamed of who he was. He openly flirted with a male waiter when we were in a restaurant in Moscow. Any suffering he experienced was not in relation to his identity.”
Fetisov’s death in 2017 at the age of 64 only hardened their resolve to tell his story. “We had made a promise to him,” says Rebane. Fetisov’s only stipulation, recalls Prior, was that “the film should be about love, not politics. Of course, it’s going to be received in a more political way now. But we wanted to make a universal story about what it means to go after love at any cost.”
. . .Even more surprising was the picture’s acceptance last year by the city’s film festival, though only the first of its scheduled screenings went ahead. “After that,” adds Prior, “there was a complaint about it being ‘homosexual propaganda’. We had 93 press articles written about it, all but one of which were negative. One headline translated as, ‘An Estonian, a Brit and a Ukrainian shame Moscow.’ Another called the film ‘a punch in the face of the Russian soldier’. It wasn’t technically banned but all tickets were cancelled. The film played to an empty auditorium.”
An unexpected consequence of the invasion of Ukraine is that some countries have expressed a reluctance to release Firebird now that the appetite for Russian stories is negligible. . ."
Firebird is in cinemas from 22 April
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