Paris, 13th District

Part of my coverage of the 57th Chicago International Film Festival.

PARIS, 13TH DISTRICT   **

Jacques Audiard

2021

IDEA:  The lives of four millennials in contemporary Paris intersect in unexpected ways, creating potentials for both sexual flings and deeper connections.

BLURB:  Paris, 13th District opens with a series of wide, panning bird’s-eye shots of the titular arrondissement, the camera picking up the myriad little dramas unfolding in the illuminated windows of apartment high-rises. It’s an introduction to the film’s milieu that hints at the voyeurism lurking within modern metropolitan living. Unfortunately, Audiard has something less provocative on his mind. Foregoing, to a rather confounding degree, the gritty urban urgency and formal stylization that have become his metier, he has turned to the realm of the banal multi-character relationship drama. Adapted by Audiard, Céline Sciamma, and Léa Mysius from stories from a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, the film is a meandering look at the romantic and professional entanglements of four French millennials uncertainly searching for love and belonging. Technology plays a governing, fairly didactic role in the narrative, as social media is depicted as a tool of both alienation and meaningful connection for the characters, who are each unrooted in some way by their sexuality or ethnicity. This empathy for marginalized identities is Paris, 13th District’s best trait, one that Audiard (and Sciamma) have movingly embraced throughout their careers. But the film is too diffuse to have the thematic power it needs, too obvious and indifferently executed to be dramatically compelling. Like its curiously static black-and-white images, Paris, 13th District is monotonous when it should be bursting with color.