The Girl From Paris
Picture: B-
Sound: B- Extras: C Film: C+
There has been a cycle of young woman/older men films
lately in French cinema, as if the situation was so unusual to begin with. One of the more predictable and awkward is
Christian Carion’s The Girl From Paris (2004), where a young woman
(Mathilde Singer) goes to farming school for two years, then lands up helping
and annoying an old school farmer (Michel Serrault) who becomes somewhat put
off by her youth and an affair she is starting to have.
The affair is never convincing, the farmer should be far
more annoyed and I was quickly bored.
Especially after the ultimately annoying and offensive cliché of
farm-bound films, the graphic killing of a pig (they should get unionize and get
a lawsuit going), the film goes more downhill.
Unlike the much better Heartland (1979, reviewed elsewhere on
this site), any such graphicness seems a desperate ploy to prop up a cold film
bankrupt of new ways to tell the same old story. The actors even look a bit bored and this is a film from a first
time filmmaker who will be lucky to have one more time after this release. Such moments do not make the viewer forget
how predictable things are. The
supposed innocence of the female lead is lame and 103 minutes felt like 2.5
hours. Maybe she should have worked for
Renault.
The anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 is not bad, but has a
few issues with fine detail and the Video Black is a bit off, in some odd
slight way. Cameraman Antoine Heberlé
sticks with a cool color palette that ultimately becomes as clichéd as the film
itself. The Dolby Digital 5.1 mix is
not spectacular, but is not bad for a dialogue-driven film with an awkward
selection of hits to boot. The many
extras include a few deleted scenes, trailers for this and other Koch DVD
titles, an alternate ending that is dumber than the predictable one it has, and
two featurettes that look more colorful than the film! This one is for Francophiles (is that a word?)
only.
- Nicholas Sheffo
