Nadja à Paris

Nadja is a student at Cité Universitaire in Paris. She talks about her life and interacts with a few people. She walks through the city. French new wave director Éric Rohmer does a short. It has no plot to speak of. It is a piece of pontification of being and a slice of Paris life during this time.

Nadja Tesich seems to be an amateur. I wish that I am more skilled in French. I can't tell if she's doing well in her speaking voice. She seems to be deliberate in her speech and maybe that's deliberate. She is supposed to be a foreigner. I don't even know if this is real or fictional. That is probably part of the point.

Nadja is an American-Yugoslav girl. She is a student at a university in Paris. She spends most of her time going around the city, observing people.

This early film directed by Eric Rohmer is the rather vague ramblings of Miss Tesich, who enjoys her life of leisure, hanging out with all sorts of people, and eating briouarts (a Moroccan pastry) in the city. It's neither more nor less deep than anything that might be written by any self-absorbed young person. While it clearly has some claim to prominence as an early effort by Rohmer, that's about the limit of it for me.

Mlle Tesich was involved in the production of two more films over the next twenty years. She died in 2014.

The film says what it is as Nadja (acted and also written by Nadja Tesich) narrates her slacker existence in 64' Paris that is more (It has a better resume than our narrator.) a new wave Paris travelogue than Nadja. Nadja has the trendy look and possible mood of the impetuous, youthful feel ex-pat (ala Seberg) but only manages to project a spoiled child's lassitude which even at 24 minutes in length is overlong.

What makes this celluloid brevity interesting is the fact that it is directed by Eric Rohmer and lensed by Nestor Almendros (Days of Heaven). In Rohmer's case Nadja might serve as an opening to one of his moral tales - it certainly mimics the dull, self absorbed characters that never seem to get anywhere in his lengthier efforts. With Almendros photography you are given no clue he would become the accomplished cinematographer he was in both Europe and Hollywood. Some of it resembles my college film class super eight work with a poorly oiled tripod. It's encouraging to know that there were moments that he was as bad as me.

This short will resonate with those, who in that beautifully exploratory, slightly melancholy part of their youthful discoveries of themselves, have lived abroad in a city like Paris - alone. There is no structure to the film, as there is no preordained structure to this exploratory journey. It's done through aimless, open-minded adventures and chance encounters that have an almost deterministic quality to them. This feast of food, art, strangers and friends-- this, Paris offers in abundance.

The film builds to a moving denouement in which the heroine reflects on what Paris has taught her about growing up. Nothing happens, but everything happens.

"Nadja a Paris," a short film from Eric Rohmer, tells the story of a Yugoslavian-born girl (who was adopted by an American family, who goes to study at the Cite Universitaire in Paris. The character development, considering the brevity of the film, is pretty good, but overall, the film doesn't pack much of a punch at all. Rohmer's other films tend to have an overlying meaning (or "point"), often in a moral lesson. This short is basically a love letter to Paris. "We'll always have Paris." We've all heard that before, and we accept it. Hearing a student experiencing the joy of Paris for the first time isn't exactly exhilarating.