entertain

Paris, je t’aime is a collection of twenty short films that show love throughout the neighborhoods of Paris. Together, the shorts make one film that demonstrates a wide variety of genres, film making styles and the different forms that love takes.

The stories include the encounters between two teenagers of different races but similar minds, a fiance and the ghost of Oscar Wilde, a stabbed, dying man and a paramedic, and a vampire and a lost tourist. A few of the others follow the stories of a husband falling in love for the second time with his dying wife, an odd, confused tourist in the subway station, a mother coping with the recent death of her young son, and two mimes. The diverse films exhibit styles that range from sweet to tragic, narrated to plain dialog, campy to simple. Big names include Steve Buscemi, Miranda Richardson, Juliette Bionoche, William Dafoe, Nick Nolte, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Elijah Wood, Emily Mortimer, Rufus Sewell, Natalie Portman and Gena Rowlands. A few of the most famous directors are the Coen brothers, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuaron, and Gerard Depardieu.

Because of the variety, it would be nearly impossible for anyone person to like every single short. But the pieces fit together nicely, balancing moods, and certain characteristics from different stories can be recognized as showing up in some of the other films. It is an artistic montage that is viewed at once as a show of separate works and as one whole, a highlight on the city of love, and it is easy to agree, "Paris, ja t’aime."