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 paris, je t'aime and portmanteau films
The Paris Commune. It's unusual to find the Coen brothers, Gus Van Sant and Gurinder Chadha on the same bill, but that's the end result of new movie Paris, je t'aime. The film, consisting of 18 Paris-set shorts from a panoply of leading international directors, is another example of what's been variously called an omnibus, compendium, portmanteau or, appropriately for this site, a collective film.One can easily see the appeal for the film makers. As Gurinder Chadha says, "you get to make a short, work with interesting people, it's a two-day shoot and it's over and done with in a week. So it was actually a lovely experience." For Wes Craven, best known for his Nightmare On Elm Street and Scream horror franchises, it was an unexpected chance to experiment.  "They gave me the 20th arrondissement and said there's Père-Lachaise," he recalls, "and I thought, 'Wes Craven, cemetery…' Then they said it doesn't have to be scary, it could be anything." And voilà, we have a Wes Craven romantic comedy featuring Rufus Sewell, Emily Mortimer, and fellow contributing director Alexander Payne as the ghost of Oscar Wilde. Elsewhere across the French capital there's Elijah Wood seduced by a vampire, Juliette Binoche mourning her dead son and Natalie Portman romancing a blind youth. Juggling 18 different casts and crews is challenge enough, never mind then sequencing them all for one final feature. "It's something you can’t organise before on paper," explains co-producer Claudie Ossard. "The editor made 83 different versions. If we don't put each segment in the right place, you can kill the segment." The common complaint levelled at omnibus films is that they rarely exceed the sum of their parts. Traditionally comprising three or four sections – think New York Stories from the illustrious trio of Scorsese, Coppola and Woody Allen, Tickets by Ermanno Olmi, Abbas Kiarostami and Ken Loach, or Eros by Wong Kar-Wai, Steven Soderbergh and Michelangelo Antonioni - one duff episode (e.g. the Olmi, Coppola and Antonioni contributions) can sink the entire enterprise.  The recent Stateside flop of Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse led to it promptly being carved up into its separate chunks (and apparent oblivion for its highlight of assorted fake trailers). So is there a risk for the film makers involved, unaware of the other material that will link to their own? Jokes Wes Craven, "The worst I saw that could happen was that everybody would be terrible and I would have done a good job!" But there's also a serious point about the different type of skill required. "How can you move someone, and tell a story at the same time, in five minutes?" asks Chadha. "I think that's really what it is about." The majority of Paris je t'aime's sections work well and the film succeeds through safety in numbers: unlike with public transport, at this omnibus stop you wait a little while, then two good shorts turn up at once. Maybe this collective strength is the way forward. "It's like a centipede," says Craven. "If it loses one leg, who cares?"
Leigh Singer
Paris, je t’aime, out now on selected release.
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