Paris vu par...

I nearly always enjoy anthology films, but this is one of the few I sadly did not. It doesn't matter to me how famous a director is, if the piece they deliver doesn't work. Half of these shorts don't even have an ending, and not in a 'slice of life' manner. They simply stop. The ones with endings are good, but none are significant in any particular way. Unless you have an obsession to see every celluloid cough by one of these directors - this one can pretty much be skipped.

Here's a chance to see a set of simply produced, very accessible little films by masters of the New Wave era.

Each story is mildly outlandish, but the storytelling is superb, and the human responses that are the focus of each story hold your attention and manage to build empathy despite the shortness of each segment.

Even though each story centers around a conflict of some sort, there's a genuine sweetness to the way situations are handled. And seeing the stories unfold against the backdrop of 1960's Paris adds an extra visual element to make these films viewer-friendly and, modest as these films are, memorable.

Six vignettes set in different sections of Paris, by six directors. St. Germain des Pres (Douchet), Gare du Nord (Rouch), Rue St. Denis (Pollet), and Montparnasse et Levallois (Godard) are stories of love, flirtation and prostitution; Place d'Etoile (Rohmer) concerns a haberdasher and his umbrella; and La Muette (Chabrol), a bourgeois family and earplugs.

Some of the names here are bigger than others. Godard is the biggest, with Chabrol probably the next in line. How big any were at the time I don't know, but now (2016) this makes for a nice sampler of different styles in what is called the New Wave. Tales of Paris seem very appropriate, and almost anticipate later films where New York is very much a subject.

Except for the idiotic Godard segment which just plain sucks, all the other directors did a hell of a job shooting these 16mm short films. In the best tradition of the French New-Wave, most of the films come as close to documentary as possible. The American girl (Barbara Wilkins) in Jean Douchet's little film about American girls who get taken for a ride by French playboys, is just wonderful in her role and perfectly portrays many nuances that have never been captured on film. Douchet was a critic at Cahiers du Cinema who wrote one of the greatest analyses of Hitchcock ever. Documentary master Jean Rouch, one of the godfathers of the New Wave is represented next in a spectacularly authentic and resonant segment that's one long continuous take for about 15 minutes straight, following its protagonist (another wonderfully authentic young girl, this time French) from the breakfast table argument with her boyfriend (producer/director Barbet Schroeder in an early role) into the street where she meets a mysterious man who wants her to go away with him. A wonderfully hilarious 10 minute segment by Jean Daniel Pollet features Michelline Dax playing the experienced Parisian prostitute to perfection as she affectionately makes fun of her inexperienced john who looks like a French version of Buster Keaton. Rohmer's piece is about a salesman/former runner who gets into an altercation with a drunk man on the street and thinks he might have accidentally killed him; it is very different from anything else Rohmer has ever done and, needless to say, quietly masterful. In Chabrol's interesting and typically Hitchcockish 'horror-under-the-prim-bourgeois-surface' expose piece Chabrol himself acts as the 'bourgeois' father and his then-wife Stephane Audran as the mother of a mischievous boy who starts putting ear-plugs in his ears to keep from hearing their constant arguments. Overall, there's a lot of decent stuff here for attentive viewers and French New Wave fans.

The premise is very simple yet quite clever, and one rather wishes that other filmmakers might collaborate, now, on something similar - a collection of vignettes with no attachment except for taking place in different parts of the same city. Mind you, despite six different filmmakers being involved, writing and directing their own short pieces, in a sense each is further unified by a common look and feel (the cinematography), and by in some capacity showing off the select neighborhood prior to or in the midst of the story being told. Otherwise, Éric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Douchet, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Daniel Pollet, and Jean Rouch each had something quite different in mind for their segment, and the overall result is a minor delight. 'Paris vu par...,' also known as 'Six in Paris' is no major must-see, but it's a good time and worth exploring, especially for those with an interest in French cinema.

Douchet's tale, set in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, offers light comedy-drama as a young woman learns the hard way about the pig-headed behavior of men looking for a one-night stand. Rouch's story, in Gare du Nord, is a domestic drama in miniature as a young couple argue, with underlying themes of dreams and aspirations versus the reality that later sets in. Pollet and Rohmer, more or less showcasing Rue Saint-Denis and Place de l'Etoile respectively, serve up light comedy, which as the film presents is a welcome palate cleanser after the heavier nature of Rouch's vignette. I'm particularly fond of Rohmer's short as his approach here very much recalls the ethos of silent movies, even including intertitles for some slight exposition. Lastly, we're given two tales that seem most primed to be full-length pictures all by themselves: Godard's, set in Montparnasse-Levallois, tells of a woman who sends telegrams expressing love to two different men but realizes she sent each to the wrong address; Chabrol's, instead simply called "La muette," closes the length with the most severe drama of all, with a household in which the parents argue and their unattended school-age son makes mischief before just shutting out the noise entirely.

Taken as a whole it's entertainment of a more modest nature that 'Paris vu par...' gives us. A couple of these segments might strike more of a chord as they come and go (Rouch's and Chabrol's, in my opinion), but not necessarily all six, though one way or another each is enjoyable in its way. Still, the cast do a fine job across the board, each segment is as well made as it is smartly written, and these ninety-five minutes pass surprisingly quickly. Unless one is a huge fan of someone involved I don't think it's anything one needs to go out of their way to see, but it's worthwhile on its own merits, and best suggested for a quiet day when you're looking for something to watch that doesn't completely require active investment.