Salina Art Center

One of the very first films featured at the Salina Art Center Cinema was When the Cat’s Away, a charming, whimsical French comedy about “The City of Light”—Paris—as viewed through the eyes of a distraught woman’s runaway cat. Actually, director Cédric Klapisch’s 1996 film used the feline as a catalyst (no pun intended) to celebrate the eccentricity and diversity of modern Paris and its quirky inhabitants. The film was a tribute to the lonely and the lovelorn, who can’t connect with one another in the most romantic city in the world. Klapisch’s breezy romp was a tribute to his favorite city, as idealized yet tangible as the New York City of Woody Allen’s Manhattan. Klapisch’s latest film is even more direct: it’s called Paris, and it takes moviegoers into corners of La Ville-Lumière ranging from the famous to the unusual, the awe-inspiringly grand to the shabby and intimate. Like a well-acted protagonist, Paris displays a variety of moods with effortless transitions between light and dark, comic and somber, gorgeous and sublime. But this isn’t a travelogue showing prettied-up sets and empty locations. This Paris is alive, teeming with fascinating characters whose lives intersect in strange ways. Humanity is the true heart of Paris, writer-director Klapisch seems to be saying: humanity with all its flaws and idiosyncrasies and soulfulness. The main characters are Pierre (Romaine Duris), a dancer who’s told he has little time left to live. His sister Élise (Juliette Binoche) and her two daughters try to cheer him up. Though she’s recovering from a broken marriage and wants nothing to do with men, Élise falls for Jean (Albert Dupontel), a street vendor; he’s divorced from Caroline (Julie Ferrier). Another circle of characters includes Roland (Fabrice Luchini), a famous historian-university lecturer who becomes infatuated with an attractive young student (Mélanie Laurent, from Inglourious Basterds) and begins stalking her. There are also amusing but well-observed characterizations in the chief supporting players: a bigoted bakery store owner (Karin Viard) and her loyal North African employee (Sabrina Ouazani). Klapisch expertly weaves this human tapestry through plot twists and great moments, both funny and tragic. Comparisons to the style of the late director Robert Altman are apt, but Klapisch is not interested in making a chaotic kaleidoscope of contrasting personalities—how Altman conveyed the vast, busy panorama of America—so much as he’s striving to create a mood of ethereal, unpredictable drama that highlights his unabashedly starry-eyed view of Paris. The city itself is the central character of the film, spinning a magical web around the lives of the distraught, the lovesick, the scared, the desperate, and the hopeful alike. It’s a city where lazing about, chatting on a pleasant afternoon at a table in a sidewalk café is an important part of daily life: work and family and recreation and love have their own peculiar rhythms and tempo in this environment. It’s a city that encourages any emotion, a city in love with theatre and the “grand gesture” (however misguided, as Roland’s increasingly eccentric behavior testifies). It’s an epic love letter to a city of the imagination, one that doesn’t exist in the “real world” but does inhabit a place in the heart of every dreamer. Various Parisians in When the Cat’s Away rallied behind the neighborhood-wide search for a missing pet—this is the kind of heroic, selfless, cooperative impulse that makes humans both lovable and ridiculous. Klapisch has refined this talent for finding the warmth and compassion in different people who at first seem self-absorbed, obnoxious, unfeeling, or insensitive. It’s a genuine artistic gift. At the end of Paris, not all of the characters we’ve met know one another, but we feel they’re all connected because they’ve been touched with this artistry. Paris is a film for film lovers… and just lovers, period.