Jacques Audiard’s black-and-white drama about modern love had a triumphant premiere at the Cannes Film Festival 2021.
The 13th district of Paris is famous for its experimental housing development, Les Olympiades, which was built in the early 1970s. At that time, the first refugees from Vietnam and other countries in South-East Asia settled here, enriching the cultural landscape of the area. The characters in Audiard’s film live in Les Olympiades—Camille, Amber, Émilie, and Nora. Each of them is looking for a relationship that will offer freedom and coincide with their personal philosophy, but reality turns out to be more complicated than theoretical musings about the nature of human feelings. A series of short-term links, relationships, and emotional experiments develops between them.
Jacques Audiard, who received the Palme d’Or for his epic drama about refugees, Dheepan, invited another Cannes laureate, Céline Sciamma, to work on the screenplay. The distinguishing feature of the method of the creator of Petite Maman and Portrait of a Lady on Fire is that she works with the story and the characters from the point of view of the female gaze. Together they reworked Adrian Tomine’s graphic novel Killing and Dying and created a lively film about relationships that is sensitive to the modern day. Their characters run from loneliness, suffer from reckless individualism, and are constantly striving for intimacy, both physical and digital. The screens of laptops and telephones, webcams and even intercoms save them from isolation and transfer human warmth.
Tourist-free and architecturally varied Paris and the young and unconventional protagonists are captured by the camera from a careful distance. This distance creates a sense not of furtive watching or interference but of cinematographic observation from the outside. The black-and-white depiction references the visuality of French New Wave classics in which people are unsure of their feelings, and Paris is recognisable but not obvious.
The film will be shown in French, English, and Chinese with Russian subtitles.
Paris, 13th District
Director Jacques Audiard
France, Italy, Netherlands, 2021. 105 min.
18+