Les Olympiades

It's excruciating having on your laptop the video file for a film you're dying to see but not having the subtitles for it. - 2022 goal: learn French. - Today, someone, God bless his soul, uploaded the English subs for the movie, and I finally got to watch it.

A beautiful film! A candid and unreserved look at love life in the early thirties, portrayed brilliantly by an - Merlant excluded - unknown cast. What I loved the most here was how the film floats around from one character to the other, detaching you in a way from them, but that worked so well in creating a cozy, calming atmosphere where you can enjoy the movie without getting too emotionally attached with any of them. Audiard takes you and puts you into a place where you can't "get hurt" by connecting too deeply or caring a lot for a character while at the same time telling a story that's supposed to do that to you. That alone, I think it's incredible to pull off, but Jacques managed to do so with flying colors. Here we got, essentially, the tearless, color-deprived version of last year's 'The Worst Person in the World' (plus through some "online dating" perspective into it). 'Paris, 13th District' was a comfortable watch for me, and I think it's a film I'll revisit because, again, I found it extremely relaxing. And with that, I don't mean there weren't moments I didn't have an emotional response to what I saw. The emotions are there, especially in the end. They just don't hit you like Hiroshima.

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.

What you see in a black and white frame are three women and a man, sex, sexuality,. I guess I'll have to work harder to understand it. It doesn't seem to be telling me anything. I read the reviews. I know it's an award-winner. I guess it doesn't speak to me.

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.

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.