Review of the film “Paris, 13th arrondissement” by Jacques Odiard

“Paris, 13th arrondissement” is a rather unexpected film from Jacques Odiard, a member of a noble French film family: his father Michel Odiard was an eminent screenwriter, he himself is no less successful director. I thought about how the French family and artistic tradition is changing while watching Andrey Plakhov.

Jacques Odyard took over from his father virtuoso professional skills and some contempt for auteur cinema. He, like his ancestor, is committed to the genre, but in a colder, aesthetic version – as a “Trojan horse” capable of conquering the viewer gradually. He is revered as the heir of Clouseau and Melville, the master of polar (French noir, or thriller). At the same time, Odyar’s highest official success was Dipan, awarded with the main prize of the Cannes Film Festival – if it is a thriller, then it is emphatically social. Its action took place in a troubled neighborhood populated by migrants of all stripes and torn apart by the squabbling of criminal clans.

In contrast to everything previous, “Paris, 13th arrondissement” is never a thriller, and the social is brought to the periphery in it. You can’t call this picture a melodrama either: there are no fatal passions in it, there are no insurmountable obstacles in the way of lovers. The main characters are modern, emancipated young townspeople; they enter into short-term relationships and change partners as easily as the place and type of work. Emily (Lucy Zhang), a trained political scientist who makes a living as a waitress and a telephone company call center clerk, says, “First I fuck, then I watch.” Camille (Makita Samba), according to him, compensates for the disappointment in his career with sexual activity. Being cohabitants of one apartment, they jump into bed on the fly, but the guy does not intend to become attached to a new partner. “After two weeks, the desire has passed, now we have a more elevated relationship, and this is for a long time,” he tells her.

The characters in the film are not prejudiced, they can joke rudely and be vulgar, they can fall into ecstasy from the MDMA “love pill”, but they also know the tides of sensitivity. If you look closely, promiscuous lightness has its own troubles, there are also individual nuances. Camille, a sex virtuoso, unexpectedly shows symptoms of misogyny. He teaches literature to students and writes a dissertation, but is forced to earn extra money in a real estate office; it also includes Nora (Noemi Merlan), who experienced abuse in her youth, and now has become a victim of bullying. She, who was pulled by the devil to wear a blonde wig to a party, was confused with a web model from a porn stream engaged in paid virtual sex (Jenny Beth), and she becomes the fourth heroine of the film.

There is also a fifth hero in it, and he is perhaps the most important. This is the 13th arrondissement of Paris, which is named as an amazing area that includes the Asian quarter, or Chinatown, where emigrants live not only from China, but from Vietnam, Laos and other former French colonies. It has existed for about a hundred years, but the Olimpiada quarter adjacent to it, consisting of high-rise buildings, is half as young. Not far from there, in Montparnasse, Jacques Odiard grew up and witnessed the birth of this “project of the century”. It was already then intended for the “people of the future” – young professionals, the backbone of the middle class. But the French turned out to be conservative: they did not really want to live in huge houses, preferring traditional Parisian quarters with cafes and bakeries. And then the Vietnamese, fleeing from communism, entered the empty apartments of high-rise buildings. Gradually, the quarter turned into “little Asia”, Africa also pulled up. At the same time, the Olimpiada quarter is an example of a civilized multicultural area, clean and safe. And there are a lot of young people with ambitions, because the National Library is nearby, and the new building of the Sorbonne on Tolbiac Street, and across the Seine is the Parisian Cinematheque, a wonderful cinema museum.

It is there that the characters of Odyar’s film live, work, meet and part ways. Nora is French from Bordeaux, black Camille is African, Emily is Chinese. And they are all Parisians, inhabitants and, one might say, patriots of their district. I understood them especially well when, having already watched the film at the Cannes premiere, I soon ended up in the Olympics quarter and lived there for two weeks on the 32nd floor of a high-rise. Odhyar looks at his characters as if from this high point, and then gets as close as possible, wandering with them with a flashlight smartphone through the labyrinths of the microdistrict, absolutely safe, but filmed in black and white, as if it were really a classic film noir. Their only enemy is the ghost of loneliness – the misfortune of all lost souls and lost generations.

The director, who already has the status of a veteran and a classic, is looking for mediums who can connect him with the present. They were the American cartoonist Adrian Tomine, whose comics are the basis of the script, as well as the French women Lea Misius and Celine Siamma who wrote it; the latter, as a director, made a splash with the feminist Portrait of a Girl on Fire. From the same film came actress Noémie Merlan; it is her line in Odyar’s picture that most of all gravitates towards the “agenda”: transparency, new ethics, respect for foreign boundaries in relations with men and, ultimately, a change in gender roles. But that’s just the least interesting part of the movie. Much more intriguing is the “sublime relationship” – tender friendship, which is sometimes better than sex, and even love.