European Films

Writer-director Christophe Honoré re-unites the male protagonists of his first and second features for his third -- and by far best -- outing Dans Paris (Inside Paris). Effectively cast against type, Romain Duris plays Paul, the moody, depressed older brother to Louis Garrel’s bubbly Jonathan. Stir in a sincere homage to the French New Wave, a touch of mourning that has become a Honoré screenplay hallmark and veterans Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier as the boys’ divorced parents and you get a near-perfect concoction. Though the self-conscious, dense and slightly illogical first half hour might throw less adventurous viewers off (it is a reflection of Duris's depressed character's state of mind), Dans Paris is about as lovely, insightful and warm a family portrait as they come. Arthouse play across the continent and beyond would be well-deserved.

Duris played the bright gay friend to Béatrice Dalle in Honoré’s otherwise dark debut 17 fois Cécile Cassard (Seventeen Times Cécile Cassard), and the director cast a brooding Garrel as the son of Isabelle Huppert’s depraved mother in the intellectually interesting but cinematically fatuous George Bataille-adapation Ma mère. Here the roles are reversed to great effect in a screenplay that finds a balance of melancholy and joy that has not graced the French screens since the heydays of the nouvelle vague. References to the serious playfulness of the films from that time abound (especially the work of Truffaut); but those unfamiliar with the New Wave will equally enjoy Dans Paris’s delicate balancing act of tone and atmosphere. There are other influences too, and they all find a cosy place in this stylistic mosaic that feels surprisingly coherent; the film's soundtrack alone is composed of jazz, punk, Kim Wilde and an improvised song by Duris (on the phone with his girlfriend).

The film opens with three people in a bed on an early morning in a Parisian apartment; they are Duris, a girl and Garrel, who escapes from the bed onto the balcony to have some privacy to talk to the audience. Yes – to you. Effectively breaking the fourth wall, Garrel’s affable Jonathan proposes to be a narrator and a bit-player in this tale, in which Duris, after a difficult break-up with his girlfriend Anna (Joana Preiss, also from Ma mère), returns from the countryside to his father’s apartment in the French capital to take over his younger brother’s room and sulk. But things are more complicated than that, and Honoré and Duris turn Paul into a depressed human being rather than a facile caricature of depression. Not incidentally, Paul and Jonathan’s late sister also suffered from the same disease.

In what is perhaps an unconscious move to counter his sister and brother’s woes, Jonathan’s approach to life is -- for lack of a better word -- frolicsome. In less than 24 hours, he seizes the day with encounters with no less than three girls, but Garrel’s swagger and Honoré’s mise en scène make sure no-one could mistake Jonathan for a serial womaniser: he is a hedonist in the most positive sense of the word, enjoying what life has to offer, rather than enjoying disposing off conquests in order to boast about them. He is in it for the enjoyment, not personal prowess. When one of the girls complains that he smells, we feel that she says it with a kind affection that cannot be faked: she loves him for it even as she complains about it. If that sounds contradictory, that is because it is.

The film’s main theme is indeed contrast: the contrast between the two brothers (and the absent sister) is the driving force behind the film, and the sense of contrast is what makes the film exciting formally as well. With two actors playing roles that are polar opposites of their previous work for Honoré (and pretty much their entire filmographies), a killer soundtrack and an involving and surprisingly resonant story, Dans Paris is one of the highlights of 2006.  

Boyd van Hoeij named Dans Paris as one of the ten Best Films of 2006.

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