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      ‘Emily in Paris’ Isn’t the Only Clichéd Show in This Town

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      Netflix doesn’t qualify as a solo offender when it comes to Gallic stereotypes, as three musical theater works on the city’s stages show.PARIS — There’s been no shortage of complaints from Parisians about the Netflix series “Emily in Paris.” Yet an endless stream of clichés about the city — from cafes by the Louvre to chain smoking and ménages à trois — isn’t merely the province of Americans. French artists indulge, too; at home, however, rose-tinted nostalgia hits differently.Musical theater has been a frequent offender, and recently, mythical visions of Paris have been on offer at two rival playhouses. At the Théâtre du Châtelet, the city often felt like the protagonist of “Cole Porter in Paris,” a musical set in the 1920s; the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées roped the designer Christian Lacroix into lending period glamour to Jacques Offenbach’s operetta “La Vie Parisienne” (“Parisian Life”).And the stereotypes woven into their fabrics, by and large, are the same. Luxury fashion? Check. Casual philandering? Check. Entitled members of the bourgeoisie? Check.“Cole Porter in Paris,” especially, is an odd offering. Created and directed by Christophe Mirambeau, it is a jukebox musical of Porter hits. The songs are uneasily stitched into a plot about the years the composer spent in the French capital, from 1917 to 1928. His love for the city ran deep: Porter’s first Broadway hit was called simply “Paris,” and he often turned to this formative period for inspiration after his return to the United States.Mirambeau draws from Porter’s large oeuvre — inserting only George and Ira Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” as a bonus — to conjure nostalgic visions from les années folles (“the crazy years,” as the 1920s are known in French). The result is a breathless tour of a decade of French culture, filtered through an American sensibility and repackaged.The World of ‘Emily in Paris’The Netflix show, starring Lily Collins in the role of an American social media wiz in the French capital, is back for a second season. Emily, C’est Moi: As an American in Paris, our critic used to look down on Emily. He then realized they have more in common than he thought. Emily’s Closet: The show was derided for its unrealistic approach to French dressing.  These looks define the upcoming season.The French Reaction: The response of actual Parisians to the first season was “ridicule” — French for ridiculous and absurd, as well as amusing.The Man Behind the Show: Darren Star, who also created “Sex and the City,” has specialized in escapist visions of the urban female experience.“I love Paris every moment,” three singers inform us in the opening number, drawn from Porter’s 1953 musical, “Can-Can.” The backdrop then rises to reveal the Eiffel Tower. When Linda Lee Thomas, Porter’s future wife, appears, she immediately launches into “You Don’t Know Paree,” first heard in “Fifty Million Frenchmen,” in 1929. (“Paree” appears in the title of three more of the evening’s songs.)With 29 numbers, the production is a musical marathon, which explains why the role of Porter is shared by three performers (Richard Delestre, Yoni Amar and Matthieu Michard). The orchestra Les Frivolités Parisiennes, which specializes in French comic opera from the 19th and 20th centuries, provided rousing backing onstage throughout.But who is the target audience? More often than not, Porter’s life serves as a flimsy excuse to flit from number to number and to drop the names of cultural figures like the impresario Serge Diaghilev and the dancer and club owner Ada “Bricktop” Smith. And for Parisians, there is something alienating about uncritical re-enactments of a perceived Golden Age.Rodolphe Briand, left, as Gardefeu and Laurent Deleuil as Bobinet in “La Vie Parisienne,” directed by Christian Lacroix at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées.Marie PétryParisian mythmaking is typically centered around a handful of eras, and at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, “La Vie Parisienne” harks back to an earlier one: the Second Empire, which lasted from 1852 to 1870. At the time, Napoleon III gave Georges-Eugène Haussmann free rein to rebuild the capital, driving rapid growth. In that context, Offenbach’s 1866 operetta aimed to portray the real lives of (some) Parisians — namely, two dandies, Gardefeu and Bobinet, who can’t decide whether to focus their attentions on promiscuous demimondaines or respectable society ladies.Offenbach both celebrates and satirizes their lifestyle. Their entanglements with two Danish characters, the Baron and Baroness Gondremarck, show aspects of the city’s growing international appeal. The Baroness seeks cultural thrills; the Baron is more interested in becoming acquainted with the aforementioned demimondaines.“La Vie Parisienne” is the directing debut of Lacroix, the designer, whom the playbill describes as a “born nostalgic.” Over the past four decades, he has created costumes for a long list of operas, ballets and plays, often drawing on original sources. A keen historian, he looked to period fashion as well as to some of the 1866 designs for “La Vie Parisienne’s” premiere, and the result is luxurious.For lovers of Offenbach, there is an additional thrill. With the help of researchers from the Palazzetto Bru Zane, a Venice-based music center, the production restores portions of the score that were cut because the original cast protested their difficulty. The five acts (rather than the usual four), conducted with joyful vigor by Romain Dumas, fly by, and an ensemble of dancers and acrobats make a welcome contemporary addition to the proceedings.Yet “La Vie Parisienne” and “Cole Porter in Paris” both feel like extensions of a similar script. Paris, we are told, is synonymous with sexual freedom. Porter’s homosexuality and his relationship with the Russian poet Boris Kochno are strong features of “Cole Porter in Paris,” while the newly revived fifth act of “La Vie Parisienne” waxes lyrical about its setting, a cafe known for providing very discreet salons for its clients.It’s an appealing myth, which has left many in France unwilling to examine to whom, and how, that freedom actually applied. It was largely limited to a small, well-to-do subset of the population. And if Paris is the city of hedonistic romance, the argument goes, why regulate office affairs or tamp down on harassment today? “Trying to steal a kiss, or speaking about ‘intimate’ things at a work dinner” — isn’t it part of French culture, as Catherine Deneuve and others implied in an open letter in the wake of the #MeToo movement?The ensemble in “Chance!,” written and directed by Hervé Devolder, at the Théâtre La Bruyère.LOTThe allure of a bourgeois office affair is also irresistible in homegrown French musicals in which Paris is just an incidental backdrop, like the witty and unassuming “Chance!” Written and directed by Hervé Devolder, and currently installed at the small Théâtre La Bruyère, this romantic comedy featuring three heterosexual couples and set in a Paris law firm has proved a long-running success, with over 1,300 performances at venues around the city since its premiere in 2001.“Chance!” contains multiple references to American musicals, but its attitude to workplace romances is decidedly French. Not only are these encouraged, but when the boss says he may have committed sexual harassment by propositioning one of his employees, the idea is swiftly dismissed: That’s impossible, the characters decide, since she loves him back.In “Emily in Paris,” the situation would be treated as a French quirk, providing viewers with an exotic frisson. But what are real-life Parisians to do with this idealized Paris? Take a hard look at it, for starters.Cole Porter in Paris. Directed by Christophe Mirambeau. Théâtre du Châtelet.La Vie Parisienne. Directed by Christian Lacroix. Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, through Jan. 9.Chance! Directed by Hervé Devolder. Théâtre La Bruyère, through Jan. 15. More

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      On Paris Stages, Black Directors Forge a New Course

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      Representation for dramatic artists of color is improving, but few Black creators get to be their own bosses. Two recent productions show what France’s mainstream theater is missing.PARIS — On a recent Sunday evening, Paris played host to a theater troupe that had come a long way. The Grand Théâtre Itinérant de Guyane traveled from French Guiana, nestled north of Brazil on the Atlantic coast of South America, with its latest production: “Bernarda Alba From Yana,” staged by the company’s director, Odile Pedro Leal.Yana, here, means Guiana. In this shrewd adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s “The House of Bernarda Alba,” the repressed sisters at the heart of the Spanish play speak Creole and dream of men who farm sugar cane. And for the first time I can recall in over a decade of theatergoing in Paris, the audience around me was predominantly Black — a situation that shouldn’t be so rare in such a racially diverse city.Yet “Bernarda Alba From Yana” was performed only once, and not in a major Paris playhouse. Instead, it was presented at the Maurice Ravel Conservatory, a training institution, as part of Le Mois Kréyol (Creole Month), a festival dedicated to promoting artists from France’s numerous overseas territories, which include once colonized islands and regions dotted around the world, from the Pacific to the Caribbean to the Indian Ocean.Since these territories are home to many people of color, Le Mois Kréyol, which was created in 2017 by the Caribbean-born choreographer Chantal Loïal, also celebrates French Blackness — and is a reminder of what the country’s mainstream theater is missing. Broadway’s power players signed a sweeping diversity pact in August; in France, overseas theatermakers and their peers of African origin remain shut out of leadership positions.Of France’s five national theaters and 38 “national dramatic centers,” none has a Black director — not even the national dramatic center in La Réunion, a multicultural French island near Madagascar. Although representation is slowly improving onstage, with more diverse drama school cohorts and regular instances of colorblind casting, it has yet to translate to Black creators being their own bosses.The dancer and activist Josephine Baker, who will be interred in the Panthéon, France’s storied tomb of heroes, on Nov. 30, is the subject of two productions this winter; neither of them is directed by a Black artist. Just this season, the lives of Nelson Mandela and Angela Davis made it to the stage in similar fashion; and in a country that prides itself on being colorblind, asking why Black directors weren’t considered is taboo.From left, Irène Bicep, Jean-Marc Lucret and Ophélie Joh in “Bernarda Alba From Yana.”Peggy FarguesAll of these shows may turn out to be good, but “Bernarda Alba From Yana” and a new production by the Guinea-born playwright Hakim Bah, “Out of Sweat” (“À Bout de Sueurs”), point to a richer way forward. It was obvious that both were steeped in an intimate knowledge of the cultures at hand. The acting palette also departed from French norms to embrace local accents, which tend to be erased elsewhere in favor of a “neutral” delivery, as well as a greater range of body language.In Pedro Leal’s hands, this makes “Bernarda Alba” a warmer proposition than usual. In lieu of the strait-laced grief often associated with García Lorca’s play, in “Bernarda Alba From Yana,” the women sing and dance through their pain. The mourning scene for Bernarda’s second husband, early in the play, is a vivid ritual, set to a Guianese song: The matriarch’s five daughters assemble around her, chanting, clapping and writhing on the floor. Later, two of the sisters, bored by the complete isolation that the domineering Bernarda has forced on them, shimmy and sway their hips in a dance-off.In that scene and elsewhere, Sarah Jean-Baptiste makes a mercurial Adela, and there is a delightful sense of mischief to many of the actors’ performances. Micheline Dieye and Pedro Leal shine as the family’s willful servants, as does Jean-Marc Lucret in a cross-dressing take on the role of Martirio. Far from altering the play’s dynamics, the contrast between the characters’ impetuous physicality and the atmosphere of repression is made all the more acute.Pedro Leal made subtle tweaks to the text to emphasize the Guianese setting. (García Lorca’s frequent references to heat offer built-in help.) Creole is so rarely heard onstage that it’s a treat to listen to performers getting lines in the language, with enough context that their meaning is clear to non-Creole speakers. Since French was imposed as the official language on many overseas territories, there is something slightly meta about hearing Bernarda (Maïté Vauclin) repeatedly berating her daughters when she hears them slipping into Creole, with the angry demand: “French in my house!”The set was presumably designed for ease of touring: curtains, some wire fence and a few seats, including a crescent-shaped Saramaka stool, must do the job from start to finish. Nevertheless, “Bernarda Alba From Yana” is a milestone for such a young company. While Pedro Leal has worked as a director in mainland France and in Guiana since the 1990s, the Grand Théâtre Itinérant de Guyane was founded only in 2017, and it is now supported by public funding. It is a part of French culture, and deserves to be seen.From left, Diarietou Keita, Vhan Olsen Dombo and Claudia Mongumu in “Out of Sweat,” directed by Hakim Bah and Diane Chavelet.Raphaël KesslerThe same could be said of the work of Bah, 34, who lives alternately in France and Guinea, where he co-founded a theater festival, Univers des Mots (Universe of Words). Bah’s plays have earned him several distinctions; “Out of Sweat,” the latest, won the 2019 Laurent Terzieff-Pascale de Boysson prize, which comes with a spot in the lineup at the Lucernaire theater.The pandemic delayed the premiere twice, but “Out of Sweat,” directed by Bah and Diane Chavelet, has now found its way to the smallest of the Lucernaire’s three stages. It is masterfully, economically built around just a handful of scenes and characters, who are from an unspecified African country. Fifi, who has immigrated to France, returns home for a fleeting visit. There, she convinces Binta, an old friend saddled with an unfaithful husband, to seduce a Frenchman online, in the hope of securing a better future.Even though the end of the play was inspired by a real-life tragedy, Bah’s approach is more poetic than realistic. What drives “Out of Sweat” is the inner logic and musicality of each scene. When Fifi and Binta are reunited, they repeat each other’s names again and again, with a mix of surprise, growing recognition and suspicion, truncating sentences in ways that build up to an intriguing rhythm.Diarietou Keita (Fifi) and Claudia Mongumu (Binta) play up both the comedy and the pathos in their relationship with vivid physicality. As Binta’s unfaithful husband, Bachir, on the other hand, Vhan Olsen Dombo is withdrawn, then suddenly destructive. In a monologue set in an airport lounge, his performance morphs into spoken word and ends in stomping and piercing cries of frustration, his pace closely mirrored by a live guitarist and electronic musician accompanying the action, Victor Pitoiset.Yet even when their behavior is extreme, all the characters in “Out of Sweat” feel rooted in a nuanced understanding of the two worlds they inhabit. Like Pedro Leal and her company, Bah is obviously ready for bigger stages. When will French theater give them, and other Black directors, a permanent seat at the table?Le Mois Kréyol. Festival directed by Chantal Loïal. Further productions around France through Nov. 28.À Bout de Sueurs. Directed by Hakim Bah and Diane Chavelet. Le Lucernaire, through Dec. 5. More

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      ‘Paper & Glue’ Review: A Sequel of Sorts to ‘Faces Places’

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      JR, plying his art of making and displaying gigantic portraits, carries on, this time without the inimitable Agnès Varda.In “Paper & Glue,” a young Hispanic man stands in the yard of a sprawling prison in Tehachapi, Calif., talking about taking part in a photographic project by the French artist JR.With a group of fellow prisoners, he posed for and then helped paste up the impressive result of their work, which spanned the expanse of the yard. Drone footage shows the men looking up out of a huge group portrait to meet the gaze of the eye in the sky. After helping dismantle the temporary display, the prisoner says with a hint of melancholy, “The process is what matters.”This handsome documentary confirms that sentiment repeatedly as the artist-director recounts two decades of his travels. In 2017, JR was half of the delightful tag-team of “Faces Places,” the Oscar-nominated documentary he and the groundbreaking director Agnès Varda made in the French countryside. “Paper & Glue,” while not as tender a romp, is a sequel in spirit. Faces and their places continue to matter. JR’s always-on sunglasses remain a coy trademark (after all, his own work relies on people showing their faces), but it’s clear strangers respond to him. The incarcerated men laugh at his stories. The women of Morro da Providência, a favela outside Rio de Janeiro, make introductions that ease his entry into their community. The French filmmaker Ladj Ly looks to him to help with a school for budding artists in a Paris suburb. A young mother in Tecate, Mexico, allows him to snap photos of her infant. In 2017, an enormous image the baby’s beatific face towers above the fence at the United States border with Mexico. Her thoughts about JR’s work are so celebratory yet nuanced, she could be his gallerist.Paper & GlueNot rated. In English, Portuguese, French and Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Only the Animals’ Review: A Missing Woman, a Cruel World

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      When an outsider disappears from a remote region in France, she leaves a mystery and a lot of messy complications in her wake.What would movies do without troublesome women — the cruel, the cold, the difficult, the dispensable? That’s one of the takeaways of “Only the Animals,” a cynical French puzzler from the director Dominik Moll about a woman who goes missing. Her disappearance stirs up the usual interest; that she’s white and wealthy helps. There’s a police investigation and news reports and plenty of pain and suffering, but the many tears the movie vigorously pumps aren’t necessarily spilled over her.The setup is fairly simple; what ensues is more complicated. (Moll and Gilles Marchand wrote the script, adapting it from a novel by Colin Niel.) When an empty S.U.V. is found on a desolate country road, the police open an investigation and begin looking for its driver, Evelyne (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), who’s been staying in a nearby vacation home. As the search continues, leads are pursued and locals interviewed. The kink here is that the story doesn’t focus on the inquiry or even Evelyne, but on five characters who have somehow contributed to her disappearance and are directly or very tangentially in her orbit. Some know her intimately; others don’t know her at all.The movie follows these five in titled chapters that assume their respective points of view and dip into their bleak, economically fragile lives. It opens with Alice (Laure Calamy, one of the delights in the French television show “Call My Agent!”), who knows next nothing about Evelyne other than what’s appeared on the news. Like everyone in this movie, Alice is largely defined by her problems, which in her case includes too many disagreeable men in her life. Calamy’s restless physicality and emotional transparency do a lot for the character, and when Alice enters a room, she jolts it awake even if she hasn’t a clue about what’s happening in it. You miss that energy when she’s not onscreen.The movie’s other most recognizably human figure is Marion (Nadia Tereszkiewicz), a young, doll-faced waitress whose relationship with Evelyne helps bring the missing woman into focus. This chapter isn’t altogether credible, and Marion’s naïveté is more narratively expedient than persuasive, but her raw desires and vulnerability are a relief from the movie’s free-ranging cruelties, petty and otherwise. The remaining chapters focus on men who together paint a grim, at times pathological picture of masculinity that the movie doesn’t engage with or doesn’t recognize. The first has profound psychological issues; the second is a violent fantasist; and the third is a desperate con artist.Telling a story through multiple perspectives is a familiar strategy: “Citizen Kane” builds on different narrative points of view, as does “Rashomon” and the recently released “The Last Duel.” Divergent voices and memories can be meaningfully deployed; they can also just be fun or showy or banal. Much depends on how and why they’re marshaled in a story, whether they create consensus or conflict, and how they work with the timeline. In “Kane,” the sweep of the title character’s life emerges piecemeal through the reminiscences of some who knew him; in “Rashomon,” the same event is recounted by characters (the dead included) who put their own spin on what occurred.In “Only the Animals,” by contrast, the multiple viewpoints are just a clever, self-satisfied device to deliver stale goods and familiar ugliness with a soupçon of glib class politics. As the cipher at its center — sacrificial lamb or guilty bourgeois, you decide! — the charismatic Bruni Tedeschi makes a predictably solid impression, which is impressive given the vaporousness of her role. The movie doesn’t deserve the actress, but its attitude toward her character is instructive. That’s particularly true in the chapter in which Evelyne is brutally assaulted, an attack that Moll lingers on long enough, getting close enough for you to see both her terror and the movie’s contempt for this woman.Only the AnimalsNot rated. In French and Nouchi, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 57 minutes. In theaters. More

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      Wes Anderson’s Dream of France, and the Paris I Remember

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      With “The French Dispatch,” the director’s latest, yet another American artist falls under the country’s spell. The Times’s Paris bureau chief recalls when the same thing happened to him.PARIS — At the premiere on Sunday before the release of his latest movie, “The French Dispatch,” Wes Anderson stood onstage in a rumpled, brownish suit and told the crowd packed into a Champs-Élysées theater, “I have a French air about me.” He had, he said, “spent my whole life feeling I am in a French movie.”Now this artful Texan and sometime Parisian with a tousled Left-Bank look has made a film so French that not a Gallic cliché is omitted. The trees are pollarded, the shutters are largely drawn, the police tend toward Inspector Clouseau look-alikes. The streets of the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé — roughly translated as Boredom-on-the-World-Weary — are dotted with rats beneath steeply pitched zinc roofs, and, of course, the talk is of love and art and gastronomic pleasure.Ennui (a word that conveys a peculiarly French sense of tedium mixed with spleen) is home to The French Dispatch, an English-language magazine whose avowed inspiration is The New Yorker. In Anderson’s telling, the fictional publication existed between 1925 and 1975 under the editorship of a certain Arthur Howitzer, Jr., who keeps as close an eye on his journalists’ expense reports as on any redundant phrase in their copy. Howitzer is loosely modeled on Harold Ross and William Shawn, the co-founder and longtime editor of the magazine that “The French Dispatch” relocates from Manhattan.The movie, however, is scarcely about journalism, apart from the occasional musing of a reporter named Lucinda Krementz (played by Frances McDormand and inspired by Mavis Gallant and Lillian Ross) who covers a mock-up of the May 1968 student uprising. “I should maintain journalistic neutrality,” she says. “If it exists.”Rather, Anderson’s nostalgia-laced film is about an old subject: the American writer in Paris. It evokes how French sensuality and style and beauty and surly realism — so completely distinct from can-do American optimism and the functional drabness of Main Street U.S.A. — can facilitate artistic reinvention and afford the space to dream.I arrived in Paris in 1975, just as The French Dispatch was ending its life, and later began work for a fortnightly American magazine called The Paris Metro, whose brief but passionate life extended from 1976 to 1978. The tone was more Village Voice than The French Dispatch, and it was a thrilling way to start in journalism. I explored the redevelopment of the Les Halles wholesale food market — then a gaping hole in the center of the city — and wrote about a suburban warehouse disco that was drawing a chic crowd all the way from St. Germain-des-Prés.The whiff of garlic, sauvignon blanc and Gauloises was still strong on the early-morning subway and there was still a horse butcher on every other block. At The Paris Metro, we all thought we were living a charmed life, however straitened our individual circumstances might be. Heck, Parisians, whatever their sophistication, needed tough, raw American journalism to see their city and culture anew. The magazine was a popular success that might have benefited from Howitzer’s attention to expense accounts.I discovered that, despite appearances, I was born an outsider. France was liberating, just as the movies of Godard, Renoir, Truffaut and Varda clearly were for Anderson. They were guides to unimagined possibility, so different in pacing and theme and structure from much of Hollywood.“I have stolen many things from your cinema,” Anderson told the Paris audience at the premiere.Theft may be a tribute, just as cultural difference may be a stimulant. The French phrase “Bof, c’est normal” — “bof” is an untranslatable French verbal shrug — fascinated me, so, at The Paris Metro, I wrote about the French reluctance to be shocked by any human antics, all waved away as “normal.” A short story called “A Slit Skirt” about a vagrant exploring the underside of Paris found its way into print but is probably best forgotten. Still, it reflected a young man’s urge to create, with Paris as the perfect backdrop.If good cheap food and wine were everywhere in those late ’70s days, beauty also overflowed: the wide bright sky on the banks of the Seine, the low-slung bridges with their subtle fulcrums, the golden domes and verdigris statuary, the streets that beckoned and the boulevards that summoned, the overflowing markets and the islands pointing their prows at the river. Paris seemed unreasonably generous.This French generosity is alluded to in “The French Dispatch” with a wistful longing by Roebuck Wright (played by Jeffrey Wright and loosely modeled on James Baldwin and A.J. Liebling), who appears in the fourth and last of the short episodes that make up the movie. He started, as he tells Howitzer, in “fires and murders,” but has moved on to the intrigues of gastronomy. He embarks on an investigation of the table of the chief of the municipal police, whose chef, Mr. Nescaffier (Steve Park), has earned a certain renown with his Blasé city park pigeon hash, among other delicacies.Journalism can be lonely, but Wright describes how invariably, on some French street, he would find “a table set for me” with its bottle of wine — “my solitary feast, my comrade.” France has modernized, of course, but it has also resisted the brand-obsessed homogenization of Anglophone countries. The comfort of that table, and the solicitous service tended to it, remain something accessible across France, as distinct as the unctuous yet mineral perfection of a Gillardeau oyster.Nescaffier, the chef, is poisoned as the police chief tries to free his kidnapped son. On his recovery, in a wonderful scene, he describes with rapture the flavor of the toxic salts in the radishes — milky, peppery, spicy, not entirely unpleasant. “A new flavor! A rare thing at my age!” he explains, with corpses strewn about.Whether the highly stylized, risibly mannered goings-on in Ennui-sur-Blasé are a mocking pastiche of what Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin and countless others found in the movable feast of France, or a Francophile director’s loving paean to that tradition, is one of those riddles that Anderson likes to play with. “I offer the film to France with admiration and respect and a little envy,” he said. Perhaps that was a clue.France clearly has an emotional hold on the director. It was the French epicure Brillat-Savarin who noted: “I have drawn the following inference, that the limits of pleasure are as yet neither known nor fixed.” In food, as in love. When, in the second story of the movie, the imprisoned painter Moses Rosenthaler (played by Benicio del Toro) makes love to his prison guard and model, identified only as Simone (Léa Seydoux), he murmurs to her “I love you.”“I don’t love you,” she says.“Already?”That French realism never goes away.I was reminded of the scene in Godard’s “La Chinoise,” in which two young Maoist revolutionaries — these are students with real heft and serious beliefs — are also lovers. A scene consists of the young man saying “Je t’aime” and the young woman saying “Je ne t’aime plus.” Some things just sound better in French, but, OK, if you insist on a translation: “I love you,” “I no longer love you.”Yes, Anderson has stolen things, but immersed in the cornucopia of France, how could he or any other American artist do otherwise? More

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      ‘Noroît’ Review: In a French Vision, Pirates Inhabit a Jacobean Drama

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      When this unusual film, made in 1976 by the French director Jacques Rivette, opens in New York this week, it will be making its official debut here.After his masterworks of the early 1970s, “Out 1” and “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” the French filmmaker Jacques Rivette conceived one of his typically ambitious projects: a four-film cycle called “Scenes From a Parallel Life.” Like “Celine and Julie,” and so many Rivette films to follow, these pictures would center on female characters and offer alternate realities by (among other things) playing with genres ancient and modern. Two of the planned four were completed in 1976, both of which are being revived this week.The first, “Duelle,” proposes a kind of private mythology spotlighting the “Out: 1” stars Juliette Berto and Bulle Ogier. “Noroît” is a postmodern pirate picture, inspired by the Jacobean drama “The Revenger’s Tragedy.”The antagonists here are Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadette Lafont. Chaplin’s brother has died at the hands of buccaneers led by Lafont. Various intrigues are undertaken to get Chaplin close enough to Lafont to kill her.Gender-swapping of the central roles notwithstanding, In some respects this is a faithful adaptation. Onscreen titles provide act and scene numbers. Chaplin and her other co-star, Kika Markham, frequently declaim portions of the play’s text in its original English language.But “Noroît” takes a more meandering path than Jacobean drama in general, pondering, as Rivette’s films tend to, notions of life as performance and vice versa. When major plot events occur, the camera seems almost indifferent to them, inexorably and meticulously moving on.The movie is best appreciated as a record of formidable female performers vibing with and against each other. At least until its last 40 minutes or so, when it reels into delirium. Various elemental effects (monochrome tints, lens-aperture lighting effects, audio dropouts) drive home its sense of unreality. The movie’s intellectual provocations — mostly pertaining to the elasticity of cinematic form — remain as lively as they were many decades ago.Noroît Not rated. Running time: 2 hour 25 minutes. In French with English subtitles More

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      ‘Little Girl’ Review: Growing Up and Seeking Peace

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      This sensitive documentary by the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz naturalistically explores the struggles of a 7-year-old transgender girl.“Little Girl,” the French filmmaker Sébastien Lifshitz’s disarmingly sensitive documentary about a 7-year-old transgender girl, understands the power of close-ups. The camera often lingers on the face of our fledgling protagonist, Sasha, not to gawk at her appearance, but to challenge whatever moralizing preconceptions one might have with emotion laid devastatingly bare.One could easily mistake “Little Girl” for a fictional drama that tends toward observation and realism. Lifshitz follows Sasha and her family over the course of roughly a year, homing in on her mannerisms and means of play with naturalistic camerawork that heightens the idyllic splendor of rural France, while framing her home life as a kind of safe haven away from the cruelties of the outside world. Beautiful as it may be, the French countryside remains a stronghold of rigidly traditional values.Sasha’s mother, Karine, often takes the spotlight: We see her struggle to convince dismissive school administrators to correctly identify Sasha as a girl and, in direct interviews, witness the emotional toll of such perpetually thwarted efforts as she verbalizes her frustrations and insecurities.There are no rubbernecking, pity-provoking scenes of Sasha being bullied or spurned; perhaps more affecting are the images we do see: Sasha miming the movements of a girl in her ballet class, delighting in what it feels like to move her hands with feminine softness and grace.In conversation with a psychiatrist, Sasha hesitates to respond to a question about her treatment at school. But the proof is in her face, which twists, flits and goes blank before capitulating to tears. It’s in simple moments like these that Lifshitz invites us to consider Sasha’s feelings: the stark reality of her despair, the depth of which only images can communicate, asking us to reconsider what exactly is fueling our ideological fights.Little GirlNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Who You Think I Am’ Review: A Woman of Feeling, in Bed and Out

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      Juliette Binoche plays an academic with a turbulent inner life that makes her complicated romantic life all the more difficult.Juliette Binoche moves through the French drama “Who You Think I Am” as if possessed. From moment to moment, her character — an academic with a turbulent inner life — looks tense or wildly happy. Emotion, by turns, lightens and darkens her translucent face, and changes her body, gait and gestures. She laughs, she cries, expands, contracts. At times, she all but floats down the street, buoyed by the love of a younger man. Then again, she may be less high on him, per se, than on how he makes her feel.Filmmakers can get a lot of mileage just by filling the screen with Binoche’s face, which is often a movie’s greatest special effect. It’s a lovely face, eternally so, yet while beauty tends to pull us in, it doesn’t necessarily hold and bewitch us, keeping us hooked. But Binoche is a virtuoso of sentiment, with a mesmerizing control of her face. She can soften, harden or crumple it into blotchy fragments, and then effortlessly piece it back together, with or without ragged seams. And while she’s a great weeper, more impressive is how these inundations, these eddies of feeling, move under her skin.You get to know Binoche’s character, Claire, through the modern-era version of the confessional box, a.k.a. a shrink’s office. She’s a mess, and a guy is to blame, or so it seems. What transpires proves more complex or at least complicated. There are two guys, Claire tells her new therapist (Nicole Garcia), both perfectly coifed and readily undressed. When the first (Guillaume Gouix), dumped her, Claire reveals, she turned to the modern-era version of the devil, a.k.a. social media, to spy on him. With a seductive photo and a fake identity, Claire transformed into the much younger Clara, sneaking into his life and then into that of the conveniently situated lover No. 2 (François Civil).There are twists and turns, some obvious, others preposterous. Characters come and go (Charles Berling pops in too briefly as Claire’s ex-husband), and time slips away as Claire giggles, glows, musses her hair and loses her bearings. Throughout, there are gestures toward larger issues, including desire, beauty, gender and age. There’s a lot of talking, some dancing and more talking, this being a French movie. In one funny, pointed scene, Claire drives in circles frantically talking to a lover on her cell while her puzzled, exasperated sons watch, waiting to be picked up. Binoche seems to be having a good time, but her character could have benefited from fewer tears and histrionics.Binoche nevertheless fluidly navigates all the narrative switchbacks and emotional storms, enough that you may not mind the pileup of strained developments and coincidences. (You may, however, snort at an expedient car accident, but only because it’s such a howler of a cliché.) You realize all too soon that Claire has a way of making things — life, love — more complicated than need be. Then again, as cutaways to her lecturing in a university classroom remind you, she does teach novels of intrigue and deception like “Dangerous Liaisons.” Given this particular movie, she presumably also lectures on “Cyrano de Bergerac” and topics like the dissimulating heroine.It’s understandable that the director Safy Nebbou, who shares script credit with Julie Peyr, keeps his focus and camera so relentlessly on Claire. (The movie is adapted from a novel by Camille Laurens.) Yet because much of the rest of the story is so underdeveloped — notably Claire’s intimate life with her frustratingly generic children — the character overwhelms everything, including the fragile realism. Some of this is obviously intentional: Claire relates swathes of the movie in the therapist’s office, so it’s all about her. Yet while Claire’s therapist (or rather Garcia) turns out to be an ideal audience, the kind of transference that makes movies work never happens.Who You Think I AmNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More