Paris 36

It is rare that all the multifarious elements of filmmaking coalesce in a single, not-to-say singular, film. But Christophe Barratier's Paris 36 manages in extraordinary fashion to twist all the strands -- script, direction, performances, cinematography, mise en scene, etc. into a delightful melange.

Many a film has unsuccessfully attempted to bring alive a narrative set in a very specific time and place against a historic background and milieu. But this film, opening on a snowy rooftop dreamscape of 1936 Paris in an imagined  district called the Fauborg in northern Paris looking at the Eiffel Tower in the distance, illuminates a self-contained Parisian section centered on a central square onto which the local music hall -- the Chansonia-- opens. With social turmoil, worker unrest, and political change (under The Popular Front) as the background, we meet some characters in the music hall on the verge of its closing and follow their attempts to bring it back to life.

There is Pigoil (Gerard Jugnot), the stage manager, who loses his unfaithful wife to a fellow music hall worker and is in danger of losing his son Jojo (Maxence Perrin) because of his unemployment; Milou (Clovis Cornillac), another worker and womanizer soon involved in worker agitation; Jacky (Kar  Merad), who improbably sees himself as a great impressionist; and in the background, a reclusive composer, Mssr. Radio (Pierre Richard), once associated with the Chansonia who has withdrawn to his apartment over unrequited love, but whose music reverberates through the Fauborg on his radio.

One day a pretty young girl, Douce (Nora Arnezeder), arrives to stir this music pot. Her mother has just died and she has come to see the now-deceased owner of the music hall where her mother had once sung, and she comes just as the resurrection of the hall is being planned and gets a job announcing acts. When fate has Douce sing a song during an early show, which the audience loudly applauds, she begins a career that reveals her mother was the love of Mssr. Radio's life and the songs she knows and sings so radiantly, learned from her mother, were composed by him.

But after being lured away -- despite a blooming romance with Milou -- by a bigtime producer, Douce returns to a Chansonia that has been faltering without  her, and to great success for all. What might seem a paint-by-number- formula plot is enriched by ineluctable performances and the brilliant cinematography of Tom Stern (Clint Eastwood's cinematographer on Mystic River, Flags of our Fathers, and Letters from Iwo Jima).

Throughout the movie there are a dozen or so songs heard from the stage and the radio in which composer and lyricist Reinhardt Wagner and Frank Thomas evoke beautifully and originally the music of the period. The cast sing and dance and comport themselves endearingly and magically.

C'est magnifique!

                                                          Howard Buck