Love and desire whirl around ‘Paris, 13th District’
“Paris,13th District” tells an old, interlinking, romantic story of several young people from the same neighborhood.
The film is directed by veteran Jacques Audiard of “A Prophet” and “Rust and Bone,” co-written by the writer-director Celine Sciamma of “Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Petite Maman,” and based on the stories of Japanese-American cartoonist, illustrator Adrian Tomine,
Beginning with a caption reading nonchalantly, “It Began Like This,” we meet Emilie Wong (Lucie Zhang), a call center operator who wraps plastic film around her waist to lose weight and lives in her dying, demented grandmother’s spacious Paris flat, renting out a room to help with her expenses.
Her newest flatmate is Camille Germain (Makita Samba), a tall and handsome public school teacher, whose mother died recently and who has a tense relationship with his father (Pol White). His grown-up sister Eponine (Camille Leon-Fucien) has a speech impediment that disappears when she performs stand-up comedy, which her father encourages.
Emilie and Camille have sex constantly, but they are “not a couple.” In fact, one night Camille brings his colleague Stephanie (Oceane Cairaty) to his room for lovemaking, and Emilie is more upset than she expected to be.
We also meet Nora Ligier (Noemie Merlant of Sciamma’s “Portrait of a Lady on Fire”), a young woman whose college studies are upset when she is mistaken by her gossipy, slut-shaming classmates at the Sorbonne for an internet porn star named Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth).
Nora, whose flat has a view of the Seine and some black mold, quits her law classes to join Camille in a real-estate enterprise he undertakes to help a friend. Nora takes charge and gets things hopping. Camille and Nora begin an affair perhaps inevitably. But the confused and perhaps sexually fluid Nora seems more turned on by her lookalike Amber Sweet, who charges a fee every few minutes to have a conversation.
“Paris, 13th District” is a portrait of a group of young people on fire. They burn for each other and for themselves. Emilie shamefully pays her new Asian flatmate to visit her grandmother, who is in a hospice. Nora, who seems indifferent to Camille’s lovemaking, watches Amber having sex with another woman. Merlant is the standout in this ensemble cast as the romantically uncertain, but admirably professional Nora, who in one scene slugs one of her former tormentors in the street. Formidable.
“Paris, 13th District” recalls Max Ophuls “La Ronde” (1950) and Francois Truffaut’s 1962 Nouvelle Vague classic “Jules and Jim,” with its couples-shifting dynamics.
Like the Richard Curtisscripted “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” “Paris, 13th District” keeps the romantic wheel spinning largely because of the charisma and sex appeal of its cast. Like its predecessors, Audiard’s film is like a dance with dancers changing partners at regular intervals.
The difference is that this dance ends with a single funeral and a perhaps illusory, but welcome pledge of romantic permanence.
(“Paris, 13th District” contains sexually suggestive scenes, profanity, drug use and nudity.