Director Elisabeth Vogler’s 'Paris Is Us' Can’t Make Up Its Mind [Review]

While the English title of “Paris est à nous” reads “Paris Is Us” — it’s the title under which the film appears on Netflix — a more direct translation would be “Paris Is Ours.” While director Elisabeth Vogler has never articulated an intentional link, connotatively, the filmmaker’s title evokes Jacques Rivette’s “Paris nous appartient,” or “Paris Belongs to Us.” Rivette’s existentialist film from the French New Wave encapsulated Cold War-era paranoia; ironically, its characters are alienated from the very Paris they inhabit.

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Now, forty-plus years later, a similar type of irony is at work in “Paris Is Us,” which takes place in a Paris ruled by nihilism and intermittent violence. No longer the shiny stuff of tourist pamphlets, the long-romanticized city becomes an absurdist arena of chaos, the faint noise of sirens in the background, the mirrored shadows of riot police with translucent shields. Filmed in the wake of Charlie Hebdo and the November 13 terrorist attacks, Vogler intersperses “Paris Is Us” with footage from real protests, reactions from a grief-stricken city reeling from trauma. Just as Rivette’s “Paris Belongs to Us” prefaced one of the most turbulent periods in the nation at large, “Paris is Us” attempts to catalog, and perhaps preemptively historicize, living in France in 2015.

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Yet make no mistake: “Paris Is Us” strays far from documentary territory, as flashbacks and flashforwards, trippy discontinuous cuts, and pulsing strobe lights act as constant reminders that the film is firmly lodged in the realm of narrative fiction.

At its core, “Paris Is Us” is a love story premised on its own, inevitable demise. One July night, Anna (Swiss-born Noémie Schmidt) meets Greg (Grégoire Isvarine) in the dark chaos of a nightclub rave, a reddish strobe erratically illuminating the couple’s silhouettes in still frames. It’s clear from the outset that Anna and Greg are the film’s romantic heroes, as they make out despite being near-perfect strangers and promise to “tell each other everything, all the things we never told anyone.” Like most lovers in romance films, Anna and Greg exchange impassioned platitudes, convinced that they “have something unique” and “can’t throw it away,” that their love is preordained or fated in some way, when in reality, it’s less about destiny and more about a toxic relationship resulting from what should’ve been a one-night stand at a rave.

Unsurprisingly, the relationship quickly devolves: He is ambitious, and she is holding him back. He has dreams of owning a house in sunny Barcelona, and she complains that he doesn’t want to support her. A few oversaturated flashbacks to sun-soaked trysts on the beach later, Greg boards a plane to Barcelona, and Anna, a habitual runner, is left alone to jog through Paris, with wide eyes and labored breathing.

Here, the narrative’s chronology splinters. Greg’s plane (maybe) crashes. Yet, in Anna’s words, “he comes back as if nothing happened, as if nothing’s changed.” There’s no explanation for why he survived, much less how he survived and escaped without a single scratch, or even if any of the plane crash sequence was real. Most macabrely, Greg’s death may have been the more compelling narrative choice. Instead, he hangs around, pestering Anna to change her ways. “The problem is that you don’t have any ambition,” he tells her arrogantly. No wonder their love is hard to root for.

Compounding this confusion, voice-overs make vague references to a rudimentary version of multiverse theory or some ill-defined schema out of “The Matrix,” accompanied by disjointed shots of Anna in a platinum blonde wig, disoriented in a stage-like room. “Did you ever think that Paris, our lives, or even the entire universe could be a huge video game?” Anna asks. “As if reality, I mean our experience of reality, was a virtual world, a computer program.” The monologue, like the rest of the film’s dialogue, extends its explanation of fatalism somewhat verbosely: “And so our lives, but maybe all of this too, would be a virtual city built by an intelligence far more superior to ours,” she continues. “Look at all these people. Don’t you think their lives are written somewhere?”

Throughout its 84-minute runtime, “Paris Is Us” toggles uneasily between these two modes of ill-fated love story and philosophical musing on authenticity and meaning — and by failing to commit to either one, the film produces an ungainly hybrid whose final words feel emptily resonant, perhaps unearned, and ultimately, more confusing than profound. If at all, the film makes a tenuous thematic connection, embodied by its heroine. Anna, frustrated with her relationship and beset by a seemingly societal anxiety, wanders Paris with a passive flâneuse demeanor, still bound to a boyfriend intent on deprecating her lifestyle at every turn.

Anna’s concluding monologue, gesturing at the Platonic allegory of the cave, provides the closest thing to clarity on the film’s formerly ambiguous thesis. The speech embodies a kind of postmodern nihilism, arising from the unpredictability and randomness of violence and the meaningless enacted by consumer culture. “A distorting line separates me from the world,” Anna narrates. “It’s like I’m in a big room divided by a curtain. On my side, I can only see the world through images, nightmarish images. Even if I know that on the other side, there is life, reality, I can’t cross through. I stay on the wrong side.”

Here, “everything is predictable. The weather, the elections, people’s reactions to commercials.” Perhaps like many other young people of her milieu, Anna is paralyzed by “this hatred, this fear, this suppression, and the resignation of our generation who knows it won’t change the world. This outside is here, inside of me, everywhere. I am all of this, everything I see outside that I can’t stand. That’s who I am now. I am all of this.” It’s a pity this statement comes so late (within the last 15 minutes), and so erratically, too. In the multiverse of its alternate iterations, “Paris Is Us” could have been a sci-fi take on parallel universes, a fatalistic romance, or even a thoughtful interrogation of life in Paris in 2015. Too bad it never made up its mind. [C]