Paris, 13th District

I was very disappointed with this movie. I like Audiard's work, he has made some excellent movies, and I was looking forward to watch this, but I found it empty, with all its supposed sexiness feeling quite shallow. The actors are ok, but their characters are superficial, and I couldn't care less of what happens to them. Even the black and white is not pretty. I think it was selected for Cannes 2021 only because of the reputation of Audiard.

The setting is Paris, 13th district. Youth culture. The fast life of millennials. Aspirations. Vanity. Egotistic admiration of one's idealised self-image and attributes. Sex. Love. Loneliness.

Written and directed by the veteran French filmmaker Jacques Audiard and shot predominantly in black-and-white monochrome, Les Olympiades, Paris 13e (2021) is adapted from three interweaving stories about sex and love by the American comic book artist Adrian Tomine.

The film is about the hope (and hopelessness) of being a millennial and trying to find your place in this fast-moving world.

It's pure honey 🍯 of an adventure into what can be shared and what is not for sharing in relationships in a laconic suburb of life and Paris, testing the limits of groking and groping for the comfort of the bourgeoisie and the meaning of commuting.

Is that all there is, my friends....it is shot as intimately as it feels....and it is impossible to put down once you experience a bit of questing sensuality.

French director Jacques Audiard tells a heartwarming story of lovers finding their paths in Paris. The film follows a handful of characters searching for happiness in the French capital. The sensual warmth of the sex scenes is intimate. The script is written by Audiard together with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius. It's loosely based on three stories in the cartoonist Adrian Tomine's collection "Killing and Dying." It isn't a literal adaptation, though there are points of connection with the original work. What unites them is how lives abruptly change and even shatter in a single moment, like in a kiss.

Serious vitality present in this piece probably just the lifeforce of the sexual drive of mankind

Those millennials here live in a very bleak world ruled by necessity survival greed selfishness in a way which previous generations can only gawp at in disbelief

It can be best summarized in the question "Is this what it has come to?" The answer is seemingly yes

Relationships are commercial transaction or shadows of that; an ersatz for human interraction; what did we seriously expect after 40 years of Neoliberalism? A more caring way of relating .... these are folks who know nothing but precariousness of work and relationships; a subtle urban brutality is written in their daily wherever they look add to that the digital alienation which is the wallpaper and in some ways the blueprint of their lives .... nothing else could have come out of all this

It is a beautiful depiction of this milieu this section of the population; the 13th Arrondissement of Paris looks more like Saõ Paulo or Shanghai than it does Paris

The truly bilingual and bicultural reality of the main character here Émilie is awesome to watch the switching between the 2 worlds between Voltaire and Kong Fu Tzu without even a blink. All the actors here are excellent and Audiart the son has produced yet another minor masterpiece like The Prophet he made a few years back. Here it is a Parisian Love story for the 21st century.