Set in the pre-World War II Paris of Jewish Prime Minister Léon Blum, Communist-backed union strikes, German-backed fascist bullyboys with bulging wallets, and the ever-evocative world of the Parisian theatre, Paris 36 strikes a tone that lands somewhere between François Truffaut’s The Last Metro and a nice long nap, with accompanying dreaminess. It’s crammed to bursting with characters and plot devices designed to make you recall, fondly, those halcyon days before the City of Lights became the City of Collaborators and Partisans (or, for that matter, the City of Amélie), but for all its glossy reminiscing and melodramatic politicizing, Paris 36 hasn’t got a thing on Weimar Berlin, as evidenced by the absence of anything approaching the blackly satirical works of George Grosz, Bertolt Brecht, or Kurt Weill. Paris 36 plays like a heavily politicized Moulin Rouge, minus the songs and dancing. That doesn’t bode well for a film that takes place almost entirely in a song-and-dance hall. While the tirelessly watchable Jugnot gives it his all as Pigoil, a cuckolded stagehand at the recently shuttered Faubourg 36 Chansonia, the whole seriocomic schmaltz fest looks and sounds an awful lot like noises way, way off. The machinations of the unctuous, pseudo-fascist businessman/mobster Galapiat (Donnadieu), who has come into ownership of the movie’s sainted theatre, are unscrupulously transparent to even the densest member of the repertory. It falls to Milou (Cornillac), a Bolshevik-minded union organizer, to create some sort of viable dramatic heft via his rivalry with Galapiat for the affections of leggy singer Douce (Arnezeder). Paris 36 isn’t, on the face of it, a farce, but it probably would’ve made matters more interesting if it were. It’s beautifully shot (by Tom Stern, who lensed Changeling and most of Clint Eastwood’s other postmillennial films) and sweet in a maudlin sort of way, but in the end, it’s much ado about nothing. Oh, the ennui, the ennui.
This article appears in April 24 • 2009.