Paris Je t’aime Reviewed

posted: 4 July 2007 Anna Chapman

Paris: populated by surly individuals and minute dogs or city of love? Guess which one is the premise of Paris Je t'aime, a collection of 18 shorts by a startling array of international directors and actors.

Producer Emmanuel Benbihy's original idea was to assign one director to each arrondissement. First on board was Run Lola Run's Tom Twyker who made a short starring Natalie Portman and a blind man in Faubourg Saint-Denis. The Coen Brothers were next up, casting Steve Buscemi as an American tourist in a metro station in the 1st.

Soon megastars were flocking to bask in Paris Je t'aime's indie credible with Juliette Binoche, William Dafoe, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bob Hoskins, Gerard Depardieu and Gena Rowlands taking parts. And the directors are equally starry with the likes of Wes Craven, Gus Van Sant, Mexican hotshot Alfonso Cuaron and Sideways' Alexander Payne contributing films.

Watching 18 films back to back might sound like hard work but each short is five minutes and, despite sharing a common theme of love, is rivetingly different. Christopher Doyle's bonkers musical about a Chinese hairdressers in Porte de Choisy is gloriously brash alongside Gurinder Chadha's gentle tale of a randy teen falling for a Muslim girl in a hijab. And the unforgiving Paris of Oliver Schmitz' immigrant stabbing is another world to Elijah Wood's vampire turn in Vincenzo Natali's odd portrait of Quartier de la Madeleine.

In fact we can't think of a better way of sampling a multicultural city than with snapshots from the world's finest directors. Next up, London and New York please.

Anna Chapman - Anna Chapman blagged her way into a job at The Face 12 years ago so she could get free CDs. Next she spent two summers on the Space terrace editing worldpop's Ibiza website. Staff jobs at Sky and Sleazenation and freelance ramblings for weighty titles like The Guardian, Vogue and Time Out kept her in beer money before Que Pasa snapped her up to launch Virgin Mobile BITES in 2004. Thanks to her one-year-old daughter and a move to Channel 4's WAP site, she spends more time clearing up than talking rubbish.