Paris, je t'aime

So, roommate-Emily recommended this movie to me, and I finally had a chance to watch it the other night. Last time she recommended something to me, she recommended the book "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" by Jonathan Safran Foer. She said it was her favorite book of all time, and so I thought I would give it a shot. I wrote a review on it a while back. If you missed it, you can read it here.

It was a good experience for me to read that book because it is something totally outside my normal box of reading choices. It wasn't something I would have picked on my own to read, and while it was not my favorite book ever, it definitely has made me think a lot. And that's good, right?

Well, it was a similar situation with "Paris, je t'aime". I had actually never heard of the movie, but Emily said it was her all time favorite movie and I should watch it! It didn't take much convincing - I love Paris (haha, that's the movie title...)! I had the chance to go for a week 3 years ago and was an unforgettable experience. I would go back in a heartbeat if I could. So last night, a freshly showered me sat in my bed with Caroline (my computer) for a movie night.

It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that I was going to need to turn on subtitles for the movie. I thought that if it was in French, it would automatically have subtitles, but it didn't. Usually I hate watching movies with subtitles because I am so ADD that I end up just reading everything and never watching what is going on on the screen. It's not as bad when you don't understand everything they are saying, though.

The movie was incredibly interesting. Something like 20 different directors were each given an arrondissement (essentially a neighborhood or region of Paris) and a time limit of 5-10ish minutes to film what their interpretation of love is. So there are 20 different and completely unrelated scenes and stories in the movie. It was not explained to me before I watched the movie that it was 20 different directors and that things would not tie together. So about 20 or 30 minutes into the movie, I realized that none of the stories would connect, and it was like watching a lot of really short films.

It was actually a lot like a collection of short stories in a book. They don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, but they are all in the same book and it is accepted as such. I guess, though, that all the short stories in the film did have 2 similarities - love and Paris.

Some of the stories were incredibly touching. (If you don't want to know specifics in the event that you want to watch it, skip the rest of this paragraph.) In one story that was especially touching, a man is about to leave his wife for a young mistress. He tells you of all the things that irk him about his wife. As they are sitting at the restaurant where he is planning to end things with her, she hands him a paper from the doctor that says she has terminal Leukemia and that she doesn't have much longer to live. Right then and there, he completely changed his mind, breaks it off with his mistress, and takes care of his wife like he never has before and rekindles that love he thought was long gone. The narrator described it as saying, "By acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again."

Some other scenes are totally weird. Like, really.

Overall, I enjoyed the movie. I would watch it again, although I would not say I loved it. I think it was really interesting, it made me think, and it was extremely creative. Kudos to whoever thought to do something like that! I think I would probably recommend the movie to others. The more I think about it and the more I process it, the more I like it.

And I'm not gonna lie, I really liked listening to all the Francois! It is such an interesting and beautiful language, and so different from English. And maybe deep down inside, it makes me feel cool.