I watched this today because it’s one of those movies I can watch any time but it was midway that I realised maybe I’d subconsciously chosen it for another reason. It connects to a lot of the movies I’ve watched recently and the feelings I’ve had watching them – from Enchanted to Penelope to Riding in Cars with Boys the other day, I even found similarities to Once here this time around. I’d never watched the introduction on the DVD of this movie before, and in it, Geoff Andrew says some things about the ending that my gut instinct disagreed with a lot, dismissing the romance at the start as meaningless teenage meanderings and such, as if the romance between Guy and Geneviève was never meant to bloom nor could have possibly bloomed, even if he’d returned to her in time. I took as much issue with that idea as I have recently with this idea that innocence lost can never be regained, etc, that I won’t go into yet again.

But as the movie went on, I did find myself looking at it in a different way from before – dare I say it, with some aging mature wisdom on my side. There are a lot of questions I’ve had over this movie in the past, like for example why I continue to love it so much when so many of the characters do things that I would never usually find acceptable. Everybody in the movie is in some way “after something” that they never ask for directly and honestly – both Guy and Geneviève in some way give up waiting for their love, the less said about Geneviève’s mother the better, Madeleine never declares her obvious love for Guy, and Roland Cassard, though perhaps the most admirable character in the movie, is always presented as a bit of a slimeball who looks down on the others – here to the rescue, yes, but through little real effort on his part. I think in the end it’s this full package of flawed characters illustrating perhaps precisely how “people things” tend to transpire whether we like them or not. Even Geneviève’s mother has a lot of pearls of wisdom, though delivered a little harshly (not to mention shrilly lol) at times.

But in the end, any amount of babble like this becomes fairly moot once you’re faced with the movie itself. From the opening title onwards – that rain falling as though from the camera itself on the people of Cherbourg, as though we the audience are already crying on the movie – this movie is simply pure magic that I could bawl through from beginning to end. The music is sublime, the colours are eye-popping, and the characters are, as I hopefully illustrated above, surprisingly complicated given the context. It has the most conflicted but beautiful ending I’ve ever seen, and I still react to it today as I did over 10 years ago when I first saw it: my stomach almost physically churns and tightens, I’m overjoyed but crushed, tears fall down my face over a wretchedly human smile on my lips. This movie isn’t beautiful … it’s beauty. If this review reads like a mess than it’s just an illustration of how the movie affects me, lol, and probably an explanation of why there hasn’t previously been a review of it here despite it being one of my all-time faves.

The most extraordinary thing about this movie to me is the humanity in it – the kind of humanity that it would be so easy to think insensitive and to exclude from such a story. Almost from the very moment “Jean-Do” realises his condition, we’re laughing with him at the strangest things even while sharing his most private despair. It’s often said when tragedy strikes how, “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy,” or words to that effect. There’s a weird sense in which, here – and this can’t help but come out the wrong way – it couldn’t have happened to a more perfect guy, a fashionista who didn’t know what life was; and there couldn’t be a more perfect director than Julian Schnabel with his background and style to find this odd tone in the story.

It’s impossible to be insensitive about locked-in syndrome; the hard thing is in building the life and reality around it. I don’t know if that makes sense; I wish I had more time to write this review, I guess, but this weekend’s busy. In any case, that’s why I only just made one final adjustment in my Oscar predix and I’m rooting for Schnabel in the directing category; and not just in retrospect for Basquiat (which I for one loved) as I’d expected.

I was really surprised by just how much of the movie is seen through Jean-Do’s one eye – it’s really amazing how consistently interesting the whole thing is in the visual department despite this. It’s just a unique, compelling, and surprisingly funny movie I can’t wait to watch again in less hurried a fashion than “must watch before the Oscars!” lol.

“You’re playing with your life.”
“So? You’ve got to play with something.”

I remember seeing the trailer for this, seems like ages ago now, before anyone was really talking about it much at all, and I was really excited despite, I realise even more now having seen it, not really being such a huge fan of Edith Piaf, and not really knowing all that much about her life. And though I’d seen Marion Cotillard in a lot of stuff, like Innocence and more recently A Good Year, she’d never struck me either as a particularly outstanding actress nor, as here, as knock-out beautiful as she is.

It’s a beautiful film that kind of closes in on the sorrow in Piaf’s life, cutting in between her close to death and at two stages of her childhood (played by two absolutely wonderful girls both rightly given more screentime than I expected), with her in her prime scattered in between. At the end, an interviewer asks her about each phase we’ve seen: “What advice would you give a woman/a young girl/a child?” to which her every answer is “Love.” The structure first strikes one as jumpy, but the more I think about it now, the more phenomenally coherent I find it. To someone who knew so little about, basically, “what was she so sad about?”, the delivery of information is perfect.

Marion Cotillard is as perfect as “they” say. I really didn’t expect it, and much as I’ll love it if Julie Christie gets the Oscar, Cotillard’s performance is simply so much more. It’s in the later scenes of Piaf’s life that my heart simply drops out of my chest at how much Cotillard vanishes in the role. The make-up, of course, helps; but it’s a two-way effort of make-up, Cotillard working with it as much as it works with her. It’s truly astonishing.

I wasn’t sure this weekend whether to watch this acknowledged silent classic version of the Joan of Arc story or Luc Besson’s lavish 1999 production first. I might’ve better understood what I wrote about the manic style of Milla Jovovich’s performance in The Messenger had I watched them the other way around – she was clearly trying to bring something of Maria Falconetti’s performance here in, in the same way there are some visual references I noticed like the cut between Jeanne’s burning face and the cross in the sky etc – but certainly watching that English language version first helped me understand the odd bits of the French interstitials here that I couldn’t quite translate (the DVD player’s still having problems with subtitles, lol – I was pretty impressed with myself how well I coped though :))

The difference between Jovovich and Falconetti’s performances is hard to put into words that don’t include, simply, “Falconetti’s is just better” – where Jovovich, like I said, came off mostly as plain crazy, Falconetti’s wide-eyed gazing comes across more like a superhuman degree of conviction obstructed by a mind too young and human to quite comprehend it; ie, simply closer to “the truth”. A sizable portion of the movie consists of simple headshots of her reacting to the men around her. It shouldn’t be anywhere near as compelling and hypnotic as it is … but it really is the greatest performance, male or female, I’ve ever seen and I don’t think I’ll ever tire of it on any number of repeat viewings.

This is before you even touch upon the aspects of the film outside of her performance. Though, like I said, it’s full of a lot of plain headshots, there are some camera moves that perhaps by sheer contrast blew my mind a little, like the rolling move that follows soldiers from an aerial angle to one level with the ground; one that tracks the spikes of a torture device down to the ground; another weird almost queasy motion while Jeanne burns, following maces thrown down to guards from a tower, up and back again, up and back again.

It’s not often I’m so immediately impressed by movies as old as this – though I consider myself to have a wider knowledge of cinema than most, it never really struck me as a given that older productions should necessarily be somehow better than modern stuff by default. Then you get exceptions like this – it is one of those movies, as François Truffaut has said, that simply “vibrates”, in this case sometimes so violently that it threatens to burst out of the screen. It amazes me that there are people who dismiss it so quickly as “just headshots” ... it’s the person who’s in those headshots. For the performance alone it’s a masterpiece. But it’s so much more besides.

I worried for a moment that this was gonna be another movie to suffer from the “Jane Eyre syndrome”. Jane Valentine, the young girl who plays Jeanne d’Arc here aged 8, is not only extraordinary, powerful, everything I in my limited knowledge associate with this person and story, not only is she a dead ringer for Milla Jovovich in the eyes, but she’s also onscreen for a hell of a longer time than I ever would’ve expected. Unfortunately, following her breaking into the church and taking mass underage, it jumpcuts forward so harshly that if I weren’t watching on the TV I’d have feared a whole reel was missing.

When Milla Jovovich appears, she’s so alternately whimpering and up-in-arms it’s at times unintentionally laughable. She, or Luc Besson, or maybe someone else involved, seems intent on showing Joan’s fear under the circumstances and I don’t know if it works, at least not the way they do it. The whole movie, as a matter of fact, suffers similarly from its own desire to entertain and be epic and commercial, etc, and I’m not sure Besson’s frequently boyish direction (you wouldn’t expect it, but some of the goggle-eyed raving here is extraordinarily reminiscent of Jean Reno in Leon) is so suited to this particular story. The occasional attempts at deliberate humour (“There’s an arrow in your leg.” “Oh. So there is.”) didn’t go down well for me either.

It certainly happens upon some stirring and memorable moments … Eric Serra’s score is reassuringly sweeping, there’s some surprising gore in the battle scenes … and ultimately I did find myself believing even in Jovovich’s manic Joan as a leader – if only because she’s sold so much as a gal who did something while everyone else was talking about doing things. The dodgy reshoot hair on Jovovich that I think I’ve heard Mark Kermode mention a few times in talking about this movie didn’t really bug me as much as I expected either – going back to the Leon similarity, she actually looks a lot like Natalie Portman’s Mathilda in her last prison scene. I’m looking forward even more to seeing the old Carl Dreyer silent now, though.

“Hey. This man’s talking about fascist vaginas.”

I was really looking forward to seeing this, especially as I ultimately did alongside Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State. Especially in that context, it’s kind of hard to talk about this movie in particular without comparing it to Richard Linklater’s Delpy/Hawke starrers Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, and I’ll admit that my biggest fear about 2 Days in Paris was that it would, if anything, be too much like that masterful pair.

The similarities are absolutely there. Julie Delpy – who writes, directs, stars, edits, composes, probably caters – is very focused on relationships; on the little things that are actually big things that make and break them.

But what won me over and eventually utterly slayed me here was the humour. I don’t think I’ve laughed louder at a movie all year. Marion’s character’s father – played by Delpy’s father – keying the cars parked on the Paris curb; the strange man on the Metro and the way Adam Goldberg attempts to stare him out; the poor American tourists at the end; the “fairy” in the fast food restaurant.

What it comes down to is the final scene where Delpy realises (in her character and literally on film) that moment in a relationship where “you can’t face another break up, and you love their sneezes more than anyone else’s kisses.” It’s so corny in a way, but these two characters are every bit as believable as Jesse and Celine were in Linklater’s movies, and it works beautifully. I was astonished by how tolerable and even sympathetic Adam Goldberg turned out to be – his frustration at not being able to understand the French language is all at once annoying, funny, and sad. Delpy is able to show warts and all both male and female “sides” of the story (not a me thing to say, I know – but I don’t know, Delpy does it in a way that’s somehow acceptable to me, it all comes from individual character rather than for the sake of it), and her ability to portray Marion’s nastier side so nakedly is truly admirable. Definitely one I’ll revisit just as much as the Jesse/Celine story, and if you’re a Paris nut like me I’m sure you’ll love it too.

I have to admit, I pretty much watched this without subtitles – my DVD player decided only a handful of lines needed translating, lol – so, armed with my creaky French, even though it’s mostly pre-adolescent girls talking or teachers talking to them (which you’d think would make it easier), it was maybe a slightly more confusing experience than necessary, and the last thing I expected this movie to be was confusing at all let alone because of the language barrier. Anyway, it’s in these situations when you actually notice a movie is, as is the case here, quite amazingly devoid of dialogue. One could sit for hours I’m sure dissecting what this movie “means”, what its images mean, etc – but really what it comes down to is the imagery, and when it comes to that, this one is really beyond compare.

I was struck immediately by the admittedly slightly obvious but perfectly effective opening of the violent noise, both visual and aural, that lies beneath an innocent looking stream … hmmm wonder what that means, huh? Follow that with a shot of five or six little girls gathering around a coffin from which another girl emerges, well, needless-to-say, I wasn’t gonna wait around for my subtitles. For its images and atmosphere alone, this is an instant favourite.

There’s one shot in particular of the girls playing randomly in the woods – some are swinging in trees, some skipping, some with hula-hoops, and the camera just drifts among them with such careless ease you’d be forgiven for thinking, as I’d say applies almost to the whole film, that you dreamt it. It reminded me of the way Picnic at Hanging Rock always appears in my memory.

Though I can’t say if it was merely to do with my missing the odd essential piece of dialogue, my attention did slip a little in the second half – I kinda wondered where the “lead”, the youngest girl, had got to during the whole theatre sequence. But it all came together in the end, and the final scene in the fountain is just shiver-inducingly striking. Literally, story aside, this is a beautiful, sad, strange experience worthy of anyone’s 2 hours. Do I need to warn that there are bare little girls’ chests and gasp a bottom or two in it? Probably. I have to admit, I had a lot of fun reading some of the IMDb comments for this one

Hmm … I hate to be the one who has the negative review of this movie, but something about this felt oddly wrong to me. I know there will be some who are quite bemused by the general praising of Victoire Thivisol’s “performance” in this movie – the kind of people who can’t remember, in fact don’t even seem to believe, that they were once children and that children are just little people with all the capabilities of bigger people etc etc, and therefore how could anyone so young as this girl actually “act”? – and I want to start by saying that’s so not how I approached the movie, even though my reaction to her performance was not as enthusiastic as I expected it to be. Anyone who knows me will know I’m perfectly willing to believe a 5-year-old can understand exactly what she’s being asked to do. But though what emotion there is here is heartbreaking, overwhelming even – I cried pretty much from start to finish, don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful movie – it’s clear to me that it had a lot more to do with luck in the shooting and a great discovery in Victoire than some miraculous god-given talent.

I’m loathe to get so specific, because, again, don’t get me wrong I still loved this movie (just not as much as I wanted) – but just take the scene where the other kids put Ponette in the dustbin … she starts to cry and they let her out; then, as she climbs out, the lid is slammed on her hand clearly by accident and as she exits the screen she’s clearly crying even more and it’s obvious they couldn’t reshoot what preceeds it any better hence the ‘goof’ stays. Like I say, I hate to get so pedantic about it, but I think it needs to be said. Certainly, it’s amazing how natural Victoire was in front of the camera at such a young age, and the same must be said for all her young co-stars … but I don’t know if it should really be called acting.

In the end, though, how can you really deny this movie’s power? I’d be shocked by anyone who doesn’t turn into a bawling baby in the very first scene where Ponette starts to cry on the trunk of the car being told about her mum. It’s one of the most heartwrenching things I’ve ever seen, and it’s really not surprising that the movie struggles to match that level of emotion for the duration, valiantly though it tries. It’s as undeniably a must-see as it gets if only for that moment alone.