Inside Paris

Synopsis: It is Christmas and Paul (Romain Duris) who has just traumatically separated from his wife (Joana Preiss) has moved in with his younger brother, Jonathan  (Louis Garrel) and father (Guy Marchand) in their apartment on the outskirts of old Paris.

Anyone who comes to this expecting something along the lines of the recent crowd-pleaser Paris, Je T’Aime will be sorely disappointed. The City of Lights is but a tangential presence here (we see the Eiffel Tower and the Seine) and the title seems to be more of a marketing ploy than anything else, Paris being, as we know, the city of choice for l’amour cinematique. We might as well be “Dans Grenoble” for all the difference the location makes to this take on the mating game, French style.

Director Christophe Honoré clearly has studied the early films of Truffaut and Godard and devised what he is trying to pass off as new millennial reworking of those iconic classics. His Jonathan is Truffaut’s Antoine Doinel, the feckless young man blithely in search of  new sensations and hopping from bed to bed whilst on the Godardian side, Duris is a kind of Jean-Paul Belmondo to Preiss’s Anna Karenin (presumably it is no accident that her character shares the same name with Godard’s one-time wife), this latter pair tormenting each other emotionally but managing to finally break into song (with Anna obligingly in her white cotton knickers) about it.

The trouble is Honoré’s film has none of the élan of its Nouvelle Vague forbears and none of their sense of time and place, characteristics which made them hits in the 1960s and still enjoyable today. In fact, Inside Paris is a horribly boring film, with the brothers two of the most irredeemably self-centred pricks you are likely to encounter in a long time and certainly not the sort of people that you want to be locked in a room with for 90 minutes whilst they carry on with their antics.

On the upside Guy Marchand, who first came to our attention as the cuckolded husband, Pascal, in Cousin Cousine (1975) is quite wonderful as the endlessly forbearing father but this is hardly enough to rescue Honoré’s failed attempt at hipness.

 

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