Most movies about pop-cultural obsessives — those individuals who live vicariously through other people’s art, films and music — are usually about young-to-middle-aged men untethered from relationships and, in many cases, social decorum: High Fidelity, Diner, Free Enterprise, Cinemania, Watching the Detectives, Play it Again, Sam.
These movies were always about men; women had more important things to worry about than catching every title in the Fassbinder retrospective or devising Top Five lists of musical minutiae. It’s not sexist if it’s true, and there is a double standard here. Record stores and repertory theaters wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for single men with a lot of time on their hands.
So forgive me if the new French comedy Paris-Manhattan sounds a bit like fantasy at times, conjuring the introverted dreamgirl of those films’ awkward protagonists, who is attractive, single, in her ’30s, ardently attends filmmaker retrospectives and collects vintage Cole Porter records. Played by Alice Taglioni, the character Alice is a rarefied creature indeed: a studious nerd of American culture who is too intimidating, cerebral and opinionated for most of the slick bourgeois Frenchmen with which her concerned family incessantly tries to set her up. They are the ones that can’t understand her obsessions; in reversing this gender paradigm, Paris-Manhattan takes an original tack.
Furthermore, Alice is particularly infatuated with Woody Allen, frequently gazing at an old black-and-white poster of the filmmaker in her bedroom, asking its advice on love, marriage and family matters. And Woody responds, as it were, in the form of dialogue extracted out of context from his own screenplays; I noticed a bit from his break-up justification speech to the crestfallen Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan.
The idea of an imaginary Allen dispensing advice is, of course, a clever inverse of Play it Again, Sam, which was framed around an invented Bogart offering noirish bon mots to Allen himself. Woody-maniacs will appreciate this connection, among other references. We’re also treated, over the course of the film, to clips from Hannah & Her Sisters and Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex.
In another funny recurring bit, Alice, who toils as a pharmacist, keeps a DVD library behind the counter and “prescribes” movies to ailing customers. She dispatches a thwarted thief with a copy of Bullets Over Broadway and cures a woman’s heartburn with Lubitsch films.
The movie is written and directed by first-timer Sophie Lellouche, and it’s obvious she shares her protagonist’s affections for the kind of talky, brainy American comedies Allen has specialized in. Unfortunately, this kinship rarely manifests in the banality of her film grammar or the preciousness of her plot, a generic and sentimental rom-com hand-me-down to which Allen, even at his least inspired, would not succumb. Alice is set up with a family friend that we know from the first moment is too seemingly perfect and well-matched, and it’s only a matter of time before she acquiesces to the rugged charms of Victor, an older, cynical home-alarm specialist played by Patrick Bruel.
When Allen himself makes a cameo in a Paris hotel, he manages to lift the film’s sagging paint-by-numbers pulse a little bit, but it’s too little, too late. Paris-Manhattan has sent its unique heroine plunging into a pool of sentimental familiarity. When Victor is asked by a co-worker, “What is special?” about his developing relationship with Alice, he replies, “Nothing. It works.” Nothing indeed. Despite its infectious enthusiasm for Allen, Paris-Manhattan ends up being another disposable title in the geek-cinema canon.
PARIS-MANHATTAN. Director: Sophie Lellouche; Cast: Alice Taglioni, Patrick Bruel, Marine Delterme, Louis-Do Lencquesaing, Michael Aumont, Marie-Christine Adam, Yannick Soulier; Rating: NR; in French with English subtitles; Distributor: Palace Films; Opens: Friday at Movies of Lake Worth, Movies of Delray, Regal Delray Beach 18, Regal Shadowood 16, Regal South Beach 18, and Miami’s Tower Theatre.