Je suis une ville endormie

Unless you live in Paris or have spent some time there, you are likely unfamiliar with the Buttes Chaumont park in the Northeast 19th arrondissement area, but this little film ,in which that park is basically the main character, will provide an intriguing introduction.

The makers of the featurette (it runs only about an hour) give us lengthy documentary style background on the park's history before we are introduced to two night clubbing youth who land up spending a series of evenings there after the park is closed, and even taking the risk of sleeping there overnight. Later (this is the most interesting stylistic feature of this otherwise conventional work) bits of more documentary footage are interspersed,and the way the story is told is also suddenly changed when halfway through we get narration from the girl (played by the daughter of former Cahiers Du Cinema critic and prolific scenarist Pascal Bonitzer) giving us her point of view on the strange relationship between these two.

The plot ends rather dramatically (a bizarre multilingual traveling writer intrudes on their secret space, along with a night time meditation group) and a bit differently than one might expect. The film does not wear out its welcome though if truth be told it could very well have sufficed as just a 35-45 minute episode in an updated version of that classic New Wave compendium, Paris Vu Par.

I will be checking out another film, 2 Autumns, 3 Winters, by the same director soon for comparison.