Love Actually (2003)
Dir. by: Richard Curtis
Starring: everyone ever
Paris Je T'aime (2006)
Dir. by: most directors
Starring: almost everyone
I pair these films based on the proximity of when I first viewed them, and how they each deal with the intersecting-vignette genre. As an added bonus, they both concern LOVE. Being in love, not being in love, loving things that aren't real, fighting for love, and giving up on it...they really get into it.
Love Actually pumps the warmth straight to your left ventricle. It's set during Christmas, book-ended by airport welcomes and farewells, and ties each tiny story together with a little bow that's so cute you can't throw away. So many tiny stories, in fact, with just the right amount of depth, that when you make the first round and revisit a couple, you had almost forgot they were there. It's creepy. You find yourself enjoying Hugh Grant, despite yourself. You accept the coincidental interlacing of lives, despite your hatred of Crash. You don't mind sappy back stories, dramatic expressions of love, or unrealistic gambles of the heart- and it's not just the British accents. All these despite-yourselves are the direct result of pervasive subtlety, amusing dialogue, and full-bodied characters. And let's not forget Christmas. You have surrendered your hard heart to two hours of ensembley goodness.
Paris Je T'aime is a collection of 18 short films, based in love on the streets of Paris. Star-studded to blindness, this collection takes the back alley to love, with many shorts dealing with love in the least likely places: divorced lovers, a drug dealer and his client, even vampires. Not surprisingly, the most enjoyable shorts are mainly from the most acclaimed directors, and between those you'll count how many shorts are left to go before the long list of credits roll. You will not get lost in these stories, that seemingly do not intertwine save for a feeble montage attempt at the very end, not because they are so short and so separate, but because the elements of exposition, political divides, and character development often lack that crucial slight-of-hand necessary in romance stories. It is a great experiment with some very valuable shorts that whisk you away to the heart of Paris, but more often than not lacks a perceptible pulse.
And this is why Love Actually is a guilty pleasure for some grown men and many many women, and why Paris Je T'aime will be found on Netflix ten years from now by about 15 people, who will think it looks like an epic film that somehow slipped under the radar, and will most likely be turned off less than halfway through, and returned with something like shame.
My advice: If you haven't seen Love Actually, just buy it. If you've seen Paris Je T'aime, watch it with someone who hasn't, and sift out the gems by the Coen Bros, Nobuhiro Suwa, Gena Rowlands, and Alexander Payne, with your finger on fast-forward. Or skip, or whatever those new-fangled dvd remotes have. Watching the films in succession will illustrate the do's and do not's of vignette films, for sure.
