Writer-director Christophé Honore clearly got a lot of out of his system in his calculatedly provocative Ma Mère (2004), with Isabelle Huppert as the most hedonistic woman on the Canary Islands and Louis Garrel actually urinating for the camera as her sullen son.
Honore and Garrel are in a mellower mood for Dans Paris, an explicit homage to the French New Wave movement (specifically Truffaut, Godard, Rivette and Eustache), with a sideways nod to JD Salinger.
Directly addressing the viewer, Garrel's Jonathan introduces the backstory of his older brother Paul (Romain Duris), a petulant photographer whose obsessively possessive attachment to his lover Anna (Joana Preiss) compels her to end the relationship.
Returning home to the Paris apartment Jonathan shares with their father, Paul is deeply depressed after the break-up, spending his days sulking in bed and refusing to eat. Jonathan eagerly endeavours to cheer up Paul, regaling him with accounts of all his sexual encounters over a single day when he goes out to the shops. This, it would seem, could only happen in Paris, a city lovingly photographed in mobile exterior camerawork.
The movie turns loquacious within the tightly enclosed apartment scenes. One indoor scene runs for several minutes while Paul merely lies on a bed singing along with Kim Wilde's Cambodia. Later he and Anna have an extended telephone conversation in which they express themselves entirely through song.
Honore would appear to relish being divisive in the manner of an enfant terrible. In Dans Paris he tests the audience's patience by focusing on someone as infuriatingly self-absorbed as Paul, while permitting Jonathan to enliven the prevailing mood with his cheery insouciance.
The chemistry between Garrel and Duris intimately captures the unbroken fraternal bond of their characters. And Honore chose wisely in casting those estimable Nouvelle Vague veterans, Guy Marchand and Marie-France Pisier, as their divorced parents.
MICHAEL DWYER
