Paris, 13th District

Émilie (Zhang) and Camille (Samba) are in love. Émilie and Camille are not in love. Camille is falling in love with Émilie, and she doesn’t want that. Émilie is in love with Camille, but he doesn’t love her back. Émilie and Camille are ex-lovers who can’t quite get out of each other’s orbit. It just depends when you see their very average but still fascinating relationship, the instigating arc of Jacques Audiard’s Paris, District 13, and their intersections with a growing population of characters.

There’s nothing extraordinary about the stories told here. Instead, Audiard searches for modern mundanity in his trail through the young professionals in Paris’ 13th arrondissement, most especially the areas around les Olympiades (the film’s original French-language title), one of the tonier, trendier areas of the city. Like 2012’s Rust and Bone, Audiard constructs a single narrative from unrelated short stories by a North American author: In the earlier film, it was two of Craig Davidson’s short stories from his anthology of the same name, and now adapting several works by American comic artist Adrian Tomine. Arguably as famous for his New Yorker covers as for his illustrated storytelling, rife with characters burdened by disaffected self-analysis, Audiard transplants his stories from the States, arguably keeping their flavor but not necessarily giving them the structure they need to really flourish as a singular narrative.

Paris, 13th District feels like it wants to be part of a tradition of emotionally and sexually blunt dramas that reaches through David Mamet’s Sexual Perversity in Chicago and Patrick Marber’s Closer (there’s even a core plot component triggered by a wig). Zhang and Samba are often fascinating as the two failed fuckbuddies, never quite in the same place emotionally with each other, but Audiard decides to convolute the issue by introducing Merlant (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) as Nora, a recent transplant to Paris whose life is complicated and bruised when she’s confused by her fellow college students with a famous cam girl. These segments, loosely adapted from Tomine’s “Amber Sweet,” feel like the setup to a genuine anthology approach, but instead it’s a long, looping storyline that intersects with and increasingly replaces Émilie and Camille’s rocky and often unromantic relationship. It’s also oddly fantastical, and inevitably works better on the page than on the screen, if simply because it implausibly depends on Nora being readily mistaken for the actual Amber (Beth, of British rock band Savages).

Audiard undoubtedly has an eye for the little details of relationships, and also of the 13th arrondissement, one of Paris’ most diverse and vibrant communities. Paul Guilhaume’s silvery cinematography catches it all in a gorgeous palette of grays, his black-and-white vision making flesh supple and lithe across the series of erotic encounters – some playful, some emotional, some tinged with tragedy and desperation. Yet the moments never quite become a whole, not least because of the disjoint between the stories of Émilie and Camille, and Camille and Nora. Maybe it’s an attempt to correct the flaws of the classic rom-com trope of “the other girlfriend,” a character introduced to add a little wrinkle in the central romance in so many films, by giving her actual agency: Yet it also means that Paris, 13th District never quite provides a good enough reason to smoosh two of Tomine’s stories together.