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Paris mon amour, "more than a place, an intellectual climate," six directors give it a go. Jean Douchet molds Saint Germain-des-Prés in Eric Rohmer's style to throw off auteurists, with a local dolt (Jean-Pierre Andréani) posing as his rich chum and negotiating with the American coed in his bed (Barbara Wilkin). Jean Rouch's Gare du Nord is informed by Hitchcock's Rope by way of a pair of handheld long takes, sneakily sutured in a showman's lampoon of cinéma-vérité. Between the dull husband (Barbet Schroeder) and the adventurous stranger (Gilles Quéant), quite the morning for the restless fille (Nadine Ballot). An amazonian prostitute (Micheline Dax) and her shrimpy john (Claude Melki) dawdle for Jean-Daniel Pollet in Rue Saint-Denis, eating pasta and reading newspapers until a blackout quashes the punchline. Rohmer's Place de l'Etoile provides a perfect expression of the place and time with fleet glances of pedestrians and monuments, virtual rough drafts for Love in the Afternoon. A Lautréamont joke, the umbrella like "a lethal weapon" for the punctilious clerk (Jean-Michel Rouzière) who rides the subway and may have killed somebody. Montparnasse-Levallois has Albert Maysles maneuvering the camera plus Garnett's envelope gag from Cause for Alarm!, the brilliance is still distinctly Jean-Luc Godard's—a sonata of welding and clanking, artist and mechanic, the Canadian lass (Joanna Shimkus) who tries to juggle two louts and receives a kick in the ass, "un action film." Claude Chabrol's La Muette is a fanged piece of buffoonery built around "noise, the price we pay for modern civilization." The filmmaker gives himself a bit of Lubitsch as the father, Stéphane Audran is the mother bleeding on the staircase, the son (Gilles Chusseau) orders earplugs to block out their idiocies. A ferocious anti-bourgeoisie sketch that accelerates to a chilling capper, the Chabrolian child alone in the cold street.
--- Fernando F. Croce |