“Paradis Paris”, an choral film by Marjane Satrapi with a golden cast

Monica Bellucci, André Dussollier, Rossy de Palma, Roschdy Zem, and Alex Lutz, Marjane Satrapi relies a little too much on her casting.

In Paris, five stories follow one another and intertwine without ever crossing paths. An embittered diva, a metaphysical stuntman, a mystical mother, a teenager addicted to her persecutor, a presenter of crime shows sees his death coming.

Marjane Satrapi plays a five-star cast, but spreads herself across too many characters. Bright, Paradise Paris errs on the side of excess, while declaring a beautiful flame to the city of lights, from Wednesday June 12, 2024 in theaters.

Paris has perhaps not been so well filmed since Truffaut. Marjane Satrapi recreates a bit of this magic, injecting it with a baroque, more Mediterranean dimension. Instead of discretion, the director prefers the exacerbation of strong characters. Muffled feelings are followed by volcanic impulses.

The identification of the roles to the performers is a painstaking task, which one would say came out of one’s Chicken with prunes, already an choral film. From the family group, the filmmaker moves to a more individual approach which unravels the threads of destiny woven on a daily basis.

However, if we are not in a sketch film, the dramatic continuity is somewhat eclipsed. Marjane Satrapi loses us, perhaps wanting to add too much, with such a palette at her disposal. It is therefore the writing which slows things down at the start, the staging favoring the exteriors which sublimate Paris.

As its title indicates, the subject is the City of Lights, the main character of the film. The setting derives from the famous perspectives of the capital and its squares, Haussmann-style facades opening onto human-sized squares. Paris becomes a city not of automobiles, but of pedestrians, where each intersection captures the light differently. Nuances and atmospheres that Marjane Satrapi conveys in this ode to the “most beautiful city in the world”, as the adage goes.

Gender : Drama
Director : Marjane Satrapi
Country : France
Duration : 1h49
Exit : June 12 2024
Distributer : StudioCanal

All public with warning

Synopsis: Ex-opera star, Giovanna fumes: while she was declared dead by mistake, the press tributes are slow in coming. Can Mike, an English stuntman, decently tremble in the face of death when he defies it every day? Smoking kills, but Dolores doesn’t care: on her granddaughter’s 15th birthday, she unilaterally makes a pact with God. While trying to commit suicide, Marie-Cerise, a harassed, humiliated and depressed teenager, is kidnapped and will naturally make her kidnapper her shrink. Edouard, although he has been presenting a famous crime show on TV for years, feels the blow when his mortality is reminded of him.

In the lively and cosmopolitan streets of Paris, these destinies intertwine and respond to each other, connected to each other by universal figures of everyday life: a cleaning lady, a cop, a cafe owner. What if, faced with death, the best thing was to live?