Bed that knocks you down - Weekend

Bed that knocks you down - Weekend


Two years after the Cannes premiere, a film by veteran French thug drama Jacques Odiard reached the Russian box office. "Paris, 13th district", however, is not about the thieves, but simply about the unsettled, and it is based not on the polar, but on the American comic book.

Text: Alexey Vasiliev

At first, the characters of "Paris, 13th arrondissement" cause annoyance. More precisely, not they, but the modern reality that gave birth to them. And then the annoyance spreads to the black-and-white film itself: how tired of the festival cinema to drive us all the same bleak lanes! Taiwanese-born Emily (debutante Lucy Zhang) holds a degree in political science. She also has an ocean-depth voice - we will hear more than once how she sings at home to herself. But its beauty, capable of dragging the listener into any bottomless whirlpool, Emily spends in the call center of a mobile operator, selling citizens unnecessary unlimited tariffs, which in fact are not so unlimited at all. Black Kamil (Makita Samba) teaches literature at the university, but, tired of the fact that "teachers are underpaid and muzzled every now and then," he goes to work for a friend in a real estate agency, in which he understands no more than his Benetton students in Rousseau. 32-year-old Nora (Noemi Merlan) seems to have listened to the call of her heart: she left the real estate business to finish her studies at the law faculty abandoned in her youth. But there she is mistaken for a certain porn stream star Amber Heard, the corresponding videos are merged into the network, and Nora's further presence in the audience becomes unbearable. The paths of these three intersect in a checkerboard pattern, couples go to bed easily, and everything goes pleasantly until the word “love” is heard - then someone jumps out from under the covers like a scalded man and there is a knock of a slamming door.

The notorious alienation of labor, which they are talking about here, is still new, it is enough to recall that even Marx defined one of the most important features of bourgeois society in this way. A person is forced to earn a living not at all by what he is predisposed to, because “that” is paid worse and is not according to his class. It is logical that such alienation, elevated into a life system, ultimately leads to alienation from everything - from love, and indeed from all feelings, we know this at least from hundreds of film dramas of the 21st century. As a result, the very contemplation of this ordinary misfortune turned into another annoying by-product of bourgeois society - into a mess, chewed a thousand times by auteur cinema, into a problem, which in itself is just right to dedicate films.

And yet, decisively in everything that, in theory, should cause irritation of recognition, some tiny detail is found here, which for some reason catches, evokes warmth and a feeling that you are at home. To begin with, a very simple physiological example. Emily's loose body is only bewildering - especially considering that the characters spend half of the film in bed. But then suddenly there is some one frame, some single angle, forcing me to remember how I myself once could not tear myself away from the same imperfect ass. The next clue is the appearance of Amber Heard (Jenny Beth, singer and former lead singer of the British group Savages): a spot of color in a black and white picture, like Shurik's dream in Ivan Vasilyevich, because her video show is shown in color. We guess that she will become the fourth key figure in the film, and the psychology of a porn blogger is always interesting, so we are waiting. In the meantime, we are looking at high-rise buildings that are more likely to make you remember Brezhnev's Moscow than Paris. Here is a brick hive - one to one Bolshaya Bronnaya, 29, inhabited in 1966, then the first McDonald's was added there. Here is a series of typical towers - Ostankino? Strogino? And between them is a pagoda turned into a supermarket. The Olympics area, which appeared in 1974, has never been the subject of a film before. The Parisians spat so much that the Vietnamese were the first to settle in it, from whom the Americans had just shot back and the construction of communism began, then other immigrants from Southeast Asia. Circling around this quarter of eternally naked and restless heroes brings to mind two cult French films of the 1980s among Soviet youth: the heroes of the 13th district look like the four talkative clerks from Eric Rohmer's painting "My Friend's Friend" (1987), who lived amid squalid municipal buildings and more talking about love than making it, a comic book artist slanted the young visionaries who inhabited squats in Jean-Jacques Benex's thriller Diva (1981).

The association with comics is not at all accidental. "Paris, 13th arrondissement" is a film adaptation of three graphic novels by Japanese-American Adrien Tomine, an authoritative author in the world of comics and part-time illustrator of The New Yorker. And his unexpected filmmaker is 71-year-old Jacques Odiard, a Cannes prize-winner and laureate, who at one time competently and timely transplanted the thieves' drama of the times of Lino Ventura and Jean Gabin into an immigrant environment in The Prophet (2009). The son, by the way, of the same Michel Odiard, a screenwriter, without whose biting words those very Gabin, Ventura, and Belmondo with them also refused to open their mouths on the set. Odyar-father was born into a family of communist proletarians and lived in Montparnasse, and when the Olympic facilities began to be erected nearby, the 17-year-old Odyar-son ran to the lyceum to the accompaniment of this construction, watching the towers growing every day on the horizon. And it is possible that it is in this shock of the young Parisian that one should look for the root of Odyar's interest in Tomine's work: half a century later, American comic book skyscrapers gave the Frenchman heroes.

Odyar clearly did not want to turn his nostalgia into a nostalgic film and called two young women who had already proved that they knew a lot about the current life as co-authors of the script. One is Celine Siamma, the director of Portrait of a Girl on Fire (2019), her name is on the lips of everyone who is not indifferent to the women's agenda (the main actress, Noémie Merlan, who simultaneously cheeky and secretive). The other, Lea Misius, who made her debut with Ava five years ago, after working with Odhyar, managed to rejuvenate the problematics and language of another veteran of French directing - Claire Denis in the same way. "Stars at Noon".

So we let it slip: "successfully." Because by the middle of the movie it will pull you in and won't let go. You will be drawn in by these attractive imperfections of forms - human, architectural and, as a result, social. Not due to the accumulation of a critical amount of these forms. It's just that they wouldn't go into quality. The recipe, as always, is the same: over the deformities of our time, a timeless and affectionate theme begins to sound, a song about tenderness. About the fact that often we love more passionately than they love us in return, and then they begin to fear us. And not being able to stop loving and out of fear of losing, we become just a friend to this person. And already when we ourselves completely forget about our true claims, our manifestations of sincere friendship, our care and readiness to come to the rescue at any hour of the night make that other one slap his forehead and run in the morning to the other end of the city to us with an armful of flowers . And then we fall into a swoon - and no alienation from love and all other feelings can stop our fall.

As for the latter, however, I'm not sure. He did not fall and did not see others perform. But one of the heroines of Odyar's film falls - and so weightlessly that you can readily believe in this particular fall of hers. How you believe in Sponge Bob and Chewbacca, how you believe in any real movie. The heroine falls, goofy electronics sounds off-screen, and the words from the old Pet Shop Boys song about just such a love are spinning in my memory: “In your bedroom you smile, and I am rubbing my eyes at a dream come true” - “In your bedroom you smile, and I rub my eyes: the dream has come true. The same words can be addressed to Odyar's new film.

At the box office from June 8


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