Like the more cumbersome New York Stories 24 years later, 1965’s Six in Paris, now on Blu-ray (Icarus Films, $25.52), is an anthology film whose central theme is its setting. Rightly believing that Paris is an “inexhaustible” subject for cinema, as he tells an interviewer in one of the Blu-ray’s extras, producer Barbet Schroeder enlisted six directors, mostly associated with the French New Wave, to film independent shorts, each set in a specific neighborhood in the City of Light.
As in any anthology film, there are apices and nadirs — stories that enrapture, and others that plod. But what’s most striking about this collection is the consistency of tone and tenor in what could have been a disjointed collage.
You could argue that such a unified style is the result of the New Wave’s overarching influence on French filmmaking at the time, as artist after artist shared the same muses: the Cinémathèque française, where they gorged on American and international classics, and the influential film journal Cahiers du Cinema. I prefer to credit Schroeder as the visionary auteur behind the project: He hired well, sparking a keen sense of chemistry from otherwise sundry elements.
The film opens with little-known director Jean Douchet’s breezy “Saint-Germain-des-Prés,” in which an American art student (Barbara Wilkin) forges a romantic connection with a local playboy (Jean-Pierre Andréani) who turns out to be an imposter. It’s a simple story, tidy and engaging, that suggests a promising career in feature filmmaking that its journeyman director would seldom explore.
The second story, Jean Rouch’s “Gare du Nord,” is accurately remembered as the masterpiece of Six in Paris. In an extra on the Blu-ray, Rouch, then a New Wave father figure admired for his fusions of documentary and fiction, explains to an interviewer his affection for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, with its daringly minimal editing, and his subsequent desire to shoot a project in a single take. He achieves this feat with the marvelous “Gare du Nord,” casting Barbet Schroeder and Nadine Ballot as a young couple bickering in their apartment.
Everything seems to irk Ballot’s Odile, from the way Schroeder’s Jean-Pierre dunks his toast in the morning to the construction cranes outside their window, creating another high-rise that will soon block their view (a reality of Parisian development that will also be addressed in Éric Rohmer’s short). She complains that Jean-Pierre doesn’t exercise anymore: “You look like Churchill. … You only think about eating now.” Rouch’s script is positively loaded with memorable dialogue that can take the form of inverted axioms —“The worst thing about marriage is that one is never alone” — while Rouch’s camera hovers over them, as hungry and invasive as a malnourished mosquito.
Even as Odile leaves for work in a huff, Rouch’s camera somehow never cuts, following her down an elevator and onto the street, where she meets a stranger who seems to pique her dormant joie de vivre, until the caprice of their encounter suddenly lurches toward tragedy. From its brazen technique to its presentation of hardscrabble middle-class life in the big city to its underlying exploration of the fleeting nature of mystery in love and life, Rouch’s film is everything the New Wave represented, distilled into 20 minutes.
Jean-Daniel Pollet has the misfortune of following “Gare du Nord” with the movie’s weakest segment, “Rue Saint-Denis,” in which a shy john (Claude Melki) hires a world-weary prostitute (Micheline Dax), only to find every avenue to delay the copulation. Like Odile in the previous short, Dax’s sex worker can be a scold. “You should exercise more,” she tells her milquetoast client, in a line that could have been lifted from “Gare du Nord.” But Pollet, reaching for comedy but rarely attaining it, doesn’t stick the landing, and “Rue Saint-Denis” withers on the vine.
Éric Rohmer’s “Place de l’Etoile” is most enjoyable if you modify your expectations. Rohmer is an effervescent chronicler of the vagaries of relationships, but his short is a departure from his usual bailiwick, featuring a commuter (Jean-Marc Rouzière) who believes he has killed a pedestrian with his umbrella after an argument on the street. Much of the story is a ballet of motion, with Rouzière’s character fleeing the scene of the crime, often dodging the city’s traffic at a frantic pace, and, in the following days, scouring local newspapers for stories about a man slain by an errant umbrella. There is humor despite the potential mordancy of the situation, but the content is almost beside the point. Perhaps more than any director in the anthology, Rohmer embraced the theme of the neighborhood as the protagonist, reveling in the on-location settings, including the Arc de Triomphe.
Schroeder saves the two most famous filmmakers for the final segments, and neither disappoint. Jean-Luc Godard, enlisting American documentarian Albert Maysles as cinematographer, is on his best behavior for “Montparnasse-Levallois,” something of a lark for a director on the precipice of some of his most politically charged work. Joanna Shimkus plays Monica, a young woman juggling two boyfriends, and who mistakenly sends Ivan a letter meant for Roger, and vice versa. She visits both men in an attempt at damage control.
Godard’s writing is smart and funny, right in line with his beloved early ’60s material, and Maysles’ camerawork brings out all the personality and subtextual menace in the settings: a sculptor’s studio, with its sharp tools and rusting hunks of metal, and an auto-body shop.
Ending, in my estimation, with the second-best short behind Rouch’s, Claude Chabrol’s “La Muette” is the only segment told from a child’s point of view. It stands apart, even in Chabrol’s imposing filmography, as one of his most experimental works in its approach to diegetic and nondiegetic sound.
Set in the director’s favored environment of the boorish bourgeoisie, “La Muette” centers on a boy living in a toxic household. His parents constantly bicker, and his father, played by Chabrol himself, is sleeping with the chambermaid. Only by discovering a set of industrial-grade earplugs is the boy able to literally mute the chaos around him, granting both himself and us the precious gift of peace and quiet. In turn, Chabrol plays with conventions of silent and sound cinema in novel ways. It’s a comedy of delicious blackness, and a fitting send-off for Six in Paris, one of the most successful examples of a historically uneven format.