Generations change. Technology changes. The way technology influences each generation changes. And, yet, French movies — despite variations in style, mores and specific concerns — remain fixed on the concept of love as the great definer and educator in human life.
“Paris, 13th District” is about three young people who experience a transformation of their being through colliding and bouncing off each other like pinballs. Love is not easy on any of them; everybody gets bruised. But one gets the sense that they’re all being pushed into the contours they were always meant to assume.
Based on four short stories by writer and cartoonistAdrian Tomine,a Sacramento native who once self-published comic strips from his apartment in Berkeley, “Paris, 13th District” inevitably has a loose structure. At any given time, a different character will seem to be the movie’s focus. But as long as we recognize that love’s transformational power is the real subject, there can be no mystery about the movie’s intentions or how it’s unfolding.
It’s centered mainly in the high-rise area called Les Olympiades, in Paris’s 13th arrondissement. French actress Lucie Zhang, a welcome discovery making her feature debut in the film, plays Emilie, who is sitting around her very nice apartment one day when there’s a knock at the door. The apartment belongs to her grandmother, who has moved into a nursing home, so Emilie is living there rent-free.
At the door is Camille (Makita Samba), a graduate student who is answering Emilie’s advertisement for a roommate. Within minutes, they’re in bed, and this sets off a whole set of power dynamics. Are they roommates or lovers? Should they be neither? And who likes whom more? Where is this going?
None of this would be particularly interesting, except that the people are interesting. Zhang has an arresting quality of seeming by turns (and sometimes almost simultaneously) reflective and reckless, deep and superficial, devoted and untrustworthy. But that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s complex. It might simply mean that she’s young.
As Camille, Samba is less mysterious. He is a recognizable type, the kind of person everyone has been at one time or another in their young life: an expert on everything. At one point, his sister tells him that she is thinking of becoming a stand-up comedian; whereupon, he launches into a long discourse against stand-up comedy. He’s being honest, but as his father points out, nobody asked for his opinion, and nobody wants it.
Noémie Merlant (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire”) rounds out the main trio, as a 32-year-old woman from the provinces who is pursuing a law degree. She is also a mystery — tentative and damaged, but with the fierce quality of someone released into a new relationship with herself. She is in the dark, and yet she has the courage of her impulses, sensing that they will lead her in the right direction.
“Paris, 13th District” is shot in black and white — not the romantic black and white of classic movies, nor that of gritty documentaries, but the slightly glossy black and white of Michelangelo Antonioni’s“日食”(1962). In “Paris, 13th District,” as in “The Eclipse,” modern architecture becomes a symbol of the alienation and coldness of contemporary life.
But Jacques Audiard (“The Beat My Heart Skipped”) is a different director from Antonioni. Plus, he’s French. He knows that no matter how cold the buildings are, no matter how many screens people are hiding behind, no matter how many ways people use sex in order to numb themselves, human beings will not stay alienated. They will always figure out a way to connect.
M“Paris, 13th District”:浪漫的戏剧。露西主演张, Noémie Merlant and Makita Samba. Directed by Jacques Audiard. In French with English subtitles. (R. 105 minutes.) In select theaters and available through video on demand starting Friday, April 15.