Dans Paris
(2006/aka Inside Paris/Genius/IFC
Films DVD)
Picture:
C+ Sound: B- Extras: C- Film: C-
Proof the
French do not know always how to handle drama or sexual material either, Christophe
Honoré’s Dans Paris (2006) is a
self-conscious mess of a drama/comedy with two brothers and their different
involvements with a woman (Joana Preiss) in the midst of living together and
with their father in dysfunctional annoyance.
Paul
(Romain Duris, CQ) is in love with
Anna (Preiss) but the relationship is far from happy and they seem to have
trouble communicating. His brother
Johnathan (Louis Garrel, Bertolucci’s The
Dreamers) is a bit more of a free-spirit and they land up sleeping
together. Instead of fighting brothers,
the dysfunction simply continues with conflicts of a different kind, but it is
so poorly written by Honoré that you wish they’d pull baseball bats on each
other. Preiss looks good, but there is
little that works anywhere here in the way of chemistry or believability
throughout.
Filling
in the space is something even odder that is dumb and also causes this all to
implode. The dialogue is obsessed with
how bad everyone smells and it is with every character that appears. It becomes such a bad joke that I wondered if
Genius forgot to send a Polyester-like
scratch & sniff card with nothing but foul notes. If there was a point to this, it never
materializes, but against a film where nothing works, seems like a final
attempt to be relevant. All in all,
except for some good performances, a total waste of time.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image has some good shots, but also its share
of motion blur and softness. Director of
Photography Jean-Louis Vialard offers some good shots, but some (a character
framed between posters of films by Gus Van Sant and David Cronenberg) can be a
bit much and don’t work despite the in jokes.
The Dolby Digital French 5.1 mix has some good surrounds and good
dialogue recording, but the soundfield (even for a dialogue-based work) can be
odd. Extras include deleted scenes, the
original theatrical trailer and a short by Honoré about Garrel with fans and
the public called Rendez-Vous With Louis.
- Nicholas Sheffo
