After «Paris is ours», a trip to Paris is in order

Saturday's Netflix & chill - Alissa Musumeci

Anna (Noémie Schmidt) and Greg (Grégoire Isvarine) meet in an ordinary way in a nightclub. Theirs is an eventful love story. Their story is punctuated by arguments and misunderstandings, but also by moments of complicity and romance. When Greg decides to move to Barcelona to make a better living, Anna calls her whole life into question.

Why does she feel so misunderstood in this world? Will she experience true love, just like in a fairy tale? Will she finally feel fulfilled? After careful consideration, she feels ready to join Greg in Barcelona. By misfortune or by chance, she misses her flight. The plane crashes shortly before it was due to arrive in Spain. This event plunges Anna into a state of melancholy, linked to memories of her childhood.

Elisabeth Vogler, the film’s director, chose a very unique way to tell the story, which I didn’t necessarily appreciate. Unfortunately, the acting leaves something to be desired: during the couple’s arguments, for example, the viewer has no access to their emotions. That’s a real shame. Furthermore, the close-ups of Anna’s body and face keep coming back, which makes the film feel heavy.

The voice-over, which is more prominent than the dialogue, attempts to convey philosophical ideas to the audience, but unfortunately there is nothing to explore or reflect on in what it is trying to teach us. The flashbacks to the past and flash-forwards to future events make the film very difficult to follow, especially since there isn’t really a clear narrative thread. The scenes on the beach, which serve as a metaphor for the love story between Greg and Anna, don’t add anything particularly clear or interesting to the film.

Paris Is Ours tries to include various highlights throughout the story. For example, the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo which occurred on January 7, 2015, in Paris. This tragedy, which shook not only all of France but also its neighboring countries, should have been given more attention. Why not devote part of the film to the feelings of Parisians? How did they recover from it? The film tells us neither when it happened, nor why, nor the impact this tragedy had on Parisian youth—even though that was supposed to be the film’s central theme.

The crash of the plane Anna was supposed to take is simply symbolized by a close-up of the cockpit as the pilot looks out at a runway. The voiceover explains, still very vaguely, how Anna feels, but once again, we don’t know when this happened, nor the circumstances or consequences of the accident.

Overall—and it pains me to say this—this film teaches us nothing. The message it aims to convey is incredibly banal, barely worthy of an amateur film. I do think, however, that the elements were well chosen; the director started with very good intentions, but they should have been staged in an entirely different way. In short, the viewer is left wanting more, a void they’ll seek to fill with a trip to the real Paris—the Paris whose heart is still reeling from recent tragedies.

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Photo credit: © Netflix