City of Love
For the last ten years I've had this feeling that one day I'll live in Paris. I don't know when exactly - could be at the end of the month; could be at the end of my life - but the certainty remains that somewhere in the City of Light there is a little maisonette with my name printed on its front door. I've only been to Paris once, when I was backpacking through Europe in 1998. A friend from university traveled with me; we managed to stay with the cousin of someone we knew back in Montreal, in a tiny apartment in the sixth arrondissement. I spent a lot of my time wandering around and doing touristy stuff, like vising Jim Morrison's grave and the Louvre; at night, the cousin took us to the Buddha Bar once (I have no clue how they let me in, with my dirty backpacker clothes), and a french jazz club where everyone hit their palms on the ceiling to showcase their pleasure for the music. When I watch films like 2 Days in Paris (not to be confused with One Night in Paris) I'm reminded all over again of this decade-old summer, as well as this nagging feeling (which conveniently pops up whenever I see any good french film) that one day I'll live there.
2 Days in Paris is written, composed, edited and directed by Julie Delpy. If you are a lover of Woody Allen's films, and you wonder what the hell happened to his career, you might find some comfort in the way Delpy turns herself into a sort of Woody Allen (when he played mysteriously irresistible intellectual types), with the smile of Diane Keaton and the sensibility of a neurotic Parisian. Add to the combination a hot American who looks Jewish, but is more like a Catholic, a lot of jokes on sex, relationships and hippie parents, and you get a kind of well-aged, tasty film. It's funny; it's sharp; it's silly; it's kinda sweet.
The film got me thinking about the portrayal of gay couples in films. iejw wrote of how gay men, when commenting on someones post, always turn the topic on themselves; they always make themselves the subject. Now, obviously that's just a generalization that could be used for anyone on LJ; but I couldn't help thinking that films about gay couples do tend to be that way. Even a film like Together, with two Chinese men living in Argentina, can't help but centre on their claustrophobic disintegration as a couple rather than explore more in depth the exotic country they have found themselves living in. With films like 2 Days in Paris, or many others where the couple is heterosexual, there's a greater sense of their "interconnectedness" with the world at large - family, friends, jobs, the cities they travel through, etc. There are certain things the audience doesn't need to be told, which are just a given. And that given opens up a lot of space for the exploration of other characters, setting, etc. Could it be that queer filmmakers feel the need to explain a lot more about a gay couple's dynamic, to the detriment of other elements of the story? It would be nice to reach a stage where certain things are just a given between the love of two men, two women, and so on.