REVIEW: Paris 36

LITTLE ROCK — Watching Paris 36 is a little like spending Christmas with strangers. The spirits are high, the relationships are warm, the personal stories have a shared history, and even though you're on the outside, you appreciate the people in a remote and admiring sort of way. Still, when it's time to leave, you're not sorry.

The beguiling nature of Paris 36 is obvious, even if you're not beguiled. Director Christophe Barratier re-creates a vivid working-class Paris, a mix of coarse reality and fantasy, and tells the story of people who work in and around the local music hall in 1936. There are lots of songs in the old music-hall style, written especially for the picture. Everyone seems to enjoy singing them, and I almost enjoyed hearing them. Others may succeed.

Still, a personal interestor connection would help. If you're French or have a specific affection for or love of prewar working-class Paris, you'll have grounding in that era's specific realities and therefore will be in a better position to appreciate the film's sentimental embroidering. Paris 36 is a sad, loving dream based on a collective national memory. But if that memory isn't already in your DNA, you can only be a guest at the party, smiling benignly at the various displays of emotion but not feeling it, while noticing that the whole affair is running way too long.

As we begin the festivities, nobody's going to the music hall anymore, so the new owner, a shady rich guy (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu), decides to close itdown. But the club's manager (Gerard Jugnot) and two associates team up to keep the theater afloat. They get nowhere with the public until they take on Douce (Nora Arnezeder), who (unlucky for her) is an object of fascination for the shady new owner.

The film is full of melodramatic turns, some effective, some not. The film's sentimental socialism gets tiresome. But Jugnot is touching as a father separated from his son by a wicked ex-wife, and Arnezeder is fresh and lovely enough to justify that individuals and audiences fall in love with Douce on sight.

The movie is on surprisingly weak ground with regard to the music hall itself. Somewhere along the line, Barratier assumes it's an object of intense audience concern that the music hall should continue to survive. He assumes that we, too, see it as a place of magic and wonder. But it ain't no Cinema Paradiso. Somehow its value is never communicated to the audience in a felt way. Or maybe that's simply the crucial aspect of Paris 36 that didn't make it safely across the Atlantic.

MovieStyle, Pages 44 on 05/22/2009