Paris, Je T'aime (2006)

Paris, Je T'aime (Olivier Assayas, Frédéric Auburtin, Emmanuel Benbihy, Gurinder Chadha, Sylvain Chomet, Ethan & Joel Coen, Isabel Coixet, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Gerard Depardieu, Christopher Doyle, Richard LaGravanese, Vincenzo Natali, Alexander Payne, Bruno Podalydès, Walter Salles, Oliver Schmitz, Nobuhiro Suwa, Daniela Thomas, Tom Tykwer, Gus Van Sant, 2006)
English Title: Paris, I Love You

Watching through Paris, Je T'aime is like eating through a box of mixed chocolate truffles. The eighteen five-minute shorts are all undemandingly commercial; a few touch on more relevant issues but most maintain an atmosphere of pure saccharine joy. Like those expensive chocolates comfortably sitting in a box, the short films come in different shapes and sizes, with different fillings and tastes --- sometimes the effort reveals a surprisingly satisfying delicacy; other times, it comes out as bland or just indescribably bad.

The omnibus starts with Bruno Podalydès Montmartre (the eighteen films' titles are derived from the different districts of Paris), where an adult man struggles to find a parking space only to end up with a woman who serendipitously faints beside his car. Most of the short films aren't complete tales. They are mostly beginnings or ends, with the other parts inconveniently left out for the imaginations of the viewers. Gurinder Chadha's Quais de Seine, about a young man who falls for a Muslim woman, and Gus Van Sant's Le Marais, about a guy who attempts to hook up with another guy he meets in a shop, can be described as starting stories for blossoming relationships. They directly address the city's ability to spark romance, even against cultural barriers.

Some of the films are anecdotes like Walter Salles and Daniela Thomas' Loin du 16e, a sentimental look at an immigrant who during the early morning, placates her baby by singing a native lullaby, and spends the rest of the day earning her keep by taking care of the baby of a more affluent mom. South African Oliver Schmitz mixes the cruelty of romantic destiny and the plight of African immigrants through his Place des Fêtes. Christopher Doyle playfully experiments while addressing the difficulty in communication between Chinese immigrants and Parisians with the largely absurd, mostly confusing Porte de Choisy.

More touching are the short films that hint of closure. The aforementioned Place des Fêtes details a relationship that ended before it even began. Isabel Coixet's Bastille narrates a break-up that goes awry when a cheating husband suddenly learns of his wife's cancer. Richard LaGravanese's Pigalle delivers a quasi-romantic wrap-up to a partnership that has aged through time. Most satisfying is Frédéric Auburtin and Gerard Depardieu's Quartier Latin which inflicts dry humor to a cordial yet painful divorce settlement. Nobuhiro Suwa's Place des Victoires portraits a heartbreaking closure for a mother mourning over the death of his son.

Alfonso Cuarón misfires with his Parc Monceau, a conversation between an old man and a younger woman walking in the streets of Paris with a not-so-insightful revelation in the end. Tom Tykwer's Faubourg Saint-Denis unsuccessfully breezes through the ups and downs of a relationship between a blind man and an aspiring actress. Opposite Tykwer's meager attempt is Olivier Assayas' more daring Quartier des Enfants Rouges which similarly discusses a relationship between an actress and a drug peddler, although aborted by their respective addictions. Unique yet disappointing is Vincenzo Natali's Quartier de la Madeleine, which puts a vampire twist in the oft-used trope of Paris being the city of lovers.

The Coen Brothers' play a prank on American tourist (wonderfully played by Steve Buscemi) in Tuileries, while Wes Craven declares that a little bit of Oscar Wilde (imagined or not) can put any rocky relationship at ease with his hilarious Père-Lachaise. Magical however is Sylvain Chomet's Tour Eiffel. The short film details the story of a Parisian mime who unintentionally wreaks havoc in Paris, and meets the love of his life in prison. Chomet, who magnifies the mundane as he has done in The Triplets of Belleville (2003), colors the already colorful streets of Paris with the imaginative antics of a less-than-charming mime artist.

Wrapping Paris, Je T'aime is Alexander Payne's 14e Arrondissement which summarizes the directors' efforts through the surprising wisdom of a middle-aged, middle-income and oversized American woman who spends her savings to stay a few days in Paris. Narrated by the American in poorly rendered French, we witness Paris in its least magical (stripped away of all the drama, the comedy, the tragedy, the romanticism and the enchantment of the short films previously shown), where food is the same as in America (burgers and faux Chinese food), the parks are the same as in America, and the people are the same as everywhere else. Yet despite its ordinariness, it still listens and speaks and accepts and gives out love proposals, as experienced (depicted with wry and typically Payne humor) by that faceless American.

The omnibus is concluded with a love song to Paris playing side by side with the resolutions of each depicted tale. Expectedly, I was on a sugar-rush. The high inflicted by the eighteen whimsical tales will soon be drowned and forgotten. What remains is that permanent desire to experience a Parisian anecdote of my own.

Imahe Nasyon (2006)

Imahe Nasyon (Poklong Anading, Yeye Calderon, Mes de Guzman, Emman Dela Cruz, Neil Daza, Lav Diaz, Tad Ermitaño, Rox Lee, Topel Lee, Milo Paz, Robert Quebral, Ellen Ramos, Raymond Red, R.A. Rivera, Lyle Sacris, EJ Salcedo, Sig Sanchez, Dennis Empalmado, Ogi Sugatan & Paolo Villaluna, 2006)
English Title: Image Nation

Twenty years after Ferdinand Marcos' regime was toppled by the EDSA Revolution, producers Jon Red and Carol Banuan Red pose a question to twenty of the country's digital filmmakers: What has happened since? Given five minutes each and absolutely limitless control to play around with the theme (and make use of actor Ping Medina), the result is Imahe Nasyon (Image Nation), an omnibus work which I thought was more interesting than it was groundbreaking.

Most of the short films are draped with cynicism; probably an indication of the rebellious character of the independent film community of anything authoritarian. Emmanuel dela Cruz's Imagining EDSA questions the validity of the EDSA exercises with Medina posing atop a fly-over imagining a metaphorical woman giving birth. Most cynical is Paolo Villaluna's One Take, a tale of a family spanning several presidential administrations ending in an upsetting tragedy (the entire five hour film is shot with one take, thus the title).

Experimental are the works of Lyle Sacris, Poklong Anading, and Roxlee. Sacris' Dibuho makes use of several digital photographs of Medina edited together to make a hypnotizing film that culminates in a rapid succession of the different faces of the Filipino people. Between Intersections, Anading's effort is a collection of several vignettes of normal Manila life; played in reverse; and multiplying successively until the entire screen is filled with the luminous chaos of the sights and sounds of post-EDSA Manila. Roxlee's La Pula mixed stop-motion animation, clever framing, and nebulous narrative to come up with a film that fancifully plays around with colonial ache and its repercussions to the Philippine psyche.

A disappointing pattern appears throughout the omnibus. There's a tendency for the filmmakers to downplay narrative and go for symbolisms --- Yeye Calderon's Silid (Room) and Emmanuel dela Cruz's Imagining EDSA are the biggest perpetrators of this annoying habit of belittling the power of five minutes. R.A. Rivera (Public Service Announcement) and Sigfreid Barros-Sanchez (Aksyon Star)'s MTVs are merely entertaining.

Tad Ermitaño and Topel Lee astound with their genre confections. Ermitaño's Local Unit brings us to a bleak futuristic Manila wherein computers make use of actual human brains to function (which totally makes sense since a human brain's memory surpasses any supercomputer's); enterprising Filipinos, as always, find a backdoor to earn an extra buck out of the new technology, paying real poor Filipinos for their brains to activate the computers of the Manila middle class. Lee's Ang Manunulat (The Writer) is a statement against the government's efforts to silence media draped in what seems to be a Lynchian horror piece.

Noteworthy is Raymond Red's Mistulang Kamera Obskura (Like an Obscure Camera) and Mes de Guzman's Tsinelas (Slippers). The former stars Medina and his father, Pen Medina looking at each other through a hole in their respective jail cells. It seems that Red is trying to compare how we view contemporary society from the point of view of the optical illusions created by photography; that for us to see life as it truly should be seen, everything should be topsy-turvy. De Guzman's cinema verite short shows a day in the life of a street sweeper who walks to Mendiola with his broken slipper. It turns out that that day is the day of the Mendiola massacre where rallyists are brutally mauled by the police; de Guzman continues his tale playing with the now-famous journalistic video of the rally, it seems like there's a belittlement of the value of the sacrifices of the past when the immediate need is the fixing of the street sweeper's slipper.

Most impressive is Lav Diaz's segment entitled Pagkatapos ng Ulan (After the Rain). His camera is motionless in a low angle position during the entire five minutes. An infrequent voice-over tells us that after the rain, the disconnected voice's mother left. Thereafter, the father left; and finally he saw himself: a jovial kid. My enchantment with this short film is the fact that the credits state that the actors are unknown, giving me an idea that Diaz merely placed a camera and filmed an everyday sequence, and building upon what he gathered during the entire five minutes of shooting, created a piece that evokes an uncontrollable emotion of separation and the difficulty for self-identification.

The omnibus is ultimately a mixed bag. A number of short films are quite forgettable, or perhaps too inappropriately dense to elicit real awe or an allure for further intellectual deliberation. In a way, the absolute freedom made the exercise slightly scattershot for the entire piece to actually speak something novel and moving about our present state.