Les Olympiades, Paris 13e
Jacques Audiard (2021)
Jacques Audiard has made some fine films – See How They Fall (1994), The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005), A Prophet (2009). His recent output is making them seem a distant memory. Audiard’s first English-language picture, the revisionist Western The Sisters Brothers (2018), was a fancy misfire and his latest continues the decline. Paris, 13th District is meretricious and unintentionally desolating.
The director wrote the screenplay with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius. The source material is three short stories by the admired American graphic novelist and cartoonist Adrian Tomine, although, as Tomine makes clear in an interview on the Curzon cinemas website, Audiard’s film is ‘using my stuff as a very basic premise, and really going off in its own direction’. The Tomine stories, according to the Curzon interview, concern ‘a former call-centre worker cast adrift in an uncertain period of her twenties’, ‘a young woman whose social life is plagued by her uncanny resemblance to a porn star’ and ‘a teenager [who] pursues stand-up comedy as a way of persevering through trying times at home’. Each of the trio is recognisable in Paris, 13th District, though it’s a shame the stand-up – by some way the film’s most likeable character – has a relatively small role.
Émilie Wong (Lucie Zhang), from a Taiwanese family, lives in an apartment belonging to her grandmother. The old lady (Xing Xing Cheng) is now in an old people’s home, where her granddaughter occasionally visits her. Overqualified for her soul-destroying call-centre job, Émilie tries to stave off boredom by repeatedly going off script with people on the other end of the phone line. Outside work, she spends most of her time on dating apps until Camille Germain (Makita Samba), a teacher and part-time doctoral student, rents a room in her apartment and they start an affair. (His younger sister, Eponine (Camille Léon-Fucien), still living at home with their widowed father (Pol White), is the would-be comedy performer.) Émilie, having fallen in love with her tenant, falls out with him because Camille doesn’t feel the same way. He leaves the apartment, quits teaching and, in order to fund his studies, gets a job in an estate agent’s office. Working there for similar reasons is Nora Ligier (Noémie Merlant), whom Camille dates and beds, although she’s anxiously unresponsive. Regularly mistaken for a porn star called Amber Sweet and slut-shamed as a result, Nora looks up and starts communicating online with her supposed doppelganger. After quite a few of these interactions, Nora and Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth) eventually meet in reality, which confirms their shared belief that they’re made for each other. After several further brief, narky encounters by phone or in person, Émilie and Camille reconcile and reach the same conclusion.
Of the four main characters (including Amber Sweet), three are in their thirties and Émilie is a decade younger. Jacques Audiard is sixty-nine. There’s a lot of sex in the film and most of the nudity – all of the most graphic nudity – is female. Paris, 13th District might have been expected to attract a deal of adverse criticism for this but the rare relevant references in reviews I’ve seen are indulgent. In NME, Elizabeth Aubrey thinks the sex ‘never feels gratuitous or, crucially, a result of the male gaze in a film where women are always front and centre’. Actually, Camille is often front and centre in terms of narrative prominence, though never full frontal, unlike Émilie and Nora. A possible explanation for why this discriminating approach doesn’t amount to male gazing comes in a piece by M J O’Toole for Hammer To Nail. O’Toole commends Audiard – ‘a widely acclaimed, but [sic!] white male filmmaker’ – as ‘wise for co-writing [Paris, 13th District] with two esteemed female French filmmakers …, resulting in a truly witty, genuine and thoughtful screenplay that helps subvert the male gaze’. How does that work – if what the director chooses to let the camera see keeps de-subverting things?
The title suggests the exact geographical setting – ‘Les Olympiades’ are high-rise apartment blocks in the 13th arrondissement – will be important but it turns out not to be (in striking contrast to the suburban Paris housing project that becomes the temporary home of the asylum seekers in Audiard’s Dheepan (2015)). Paul Guilhaume’s black-and-white cinematography has been variously described as ‘sumptuous’ (Rob Aldam, Backseat Mafia) and ‘harsh’ (Elizabeth Aubrey). The former is closer to the mark. There are atmospheric nighttime shots of the tower blocks but nothing hard-scrabble about the lives being described: the concrete jungle that is Les Olympiades has no evident psychological effect on any of them. Deciding to make the film in black and white comes across as a senior citizen’s bid to be distinctive and even modish.
The bid has succeeded, at least in the eyes of the admiring critics who see fit to compare Paris, 13th District with films that appeared in the efflorescence of the nouvelle vague sixty years ago. I suppose they do have in common young protagonists and the enduring dazzle of France’s capital city. Also from more than half a century ago, I remember a review of Arthur Hiller’s Love Story (1970) by Margaret Drabble in The Listener. Lofty denunciations of this box-office smash, the film of the Erich Segal novel that was already a commercial phenomenon, weren’t hard to find but Drabble’s was funny, especially on the impossibility of transposing Segal’s tale from America to England: if the Harvard jock hero had been an Oxbridge rowing blue, she said, no one would have taken him seriously. The workplace where Camille and Nora meet in Paris, 13th District kept reminding me of this. Even if they were ‘trying to navigate love in a digital age be it via casual hook-ups, dating apps or online porn’ (NME again), millennial estate agents in London rather than Paris could only be characters in a broad comedy.
The actors are good, especially Camille Léon-Fucien as the stammering stand-up and Noémie Merlant, who makes Nora’s literal-mindedness both amusing and sad. But Nora’s outlook, like those of the other principals, is scarily shallow. The problem isn’t their often thwarted hedonism but their lack of interest in anything outside themselves. Camille shows no more intellectual appetite for the literature doctorate he’s working towards than for selling real estate. His political views don’t extend beyond railing against the state of the over-scrutinised, under-resourced teaching profession he decides to leave. He’s still preferable to Émilie, though. The warning signs are there as soon as it’s clear we’re meant to find her dissident approach to call-centre work zany and endearing. What Émilie later does in relation to her grandmother is something else.
When Camille has moved out and she needs a new tenant, Émilie offers a prospective female flatmate a rent reduction in exchange for regularly visiting the grandmother on her behalf: since her dementia means she no longer recognises Émilie, it won’t make any difference. I wondered if, and hoped that, this breathtaking proposition – the most memorable thing in the film – might be revealed as masking Émilie’s intolerable distress at the extinction of a person she loved. It’s true that, when the grandmother eventually dies, Émilie sheds tears. But, on the day of the funeral, her misery seems to be about fearing Camille won’t turn up to accompany her to the event. She’s about to leave the apartment when he arrives, and Audiard chooses this moment to deliver the standard rom-com resolution that puts a smile back on the heroine’s face. When Émilie finally dashes out to meet Camille downstairs, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether they’ll bother going to the funeral at all. I wouldn’t have wanted Jacques Audiard to take a morally censorious attitude towards the people in Paris, 13th District. I just wish he hadn’t bothered making a film about them.
24 March 2022
