Who wouldn’t want something like that when the time comes: a high-tech coffin with a cell phone and emergency oxygen supply?
Photo: Vito Films/Christophe Offret
It’s an effect like something out of a cheap horror film: Giovanna starts up in a refrigerator. Luckily she hasn’t been buried yet, but is in the morgue where her husband is expected. He’s standing in exactly the right place with his trolley suitcase, coming straight from the airport. Is someone singing? Indeed, after a few understandable cries of horror, Giovanna began to resort to her repertoire. That made sense because she was, no, is an opera singer. And singing is always good for fear, whether in the dark forest or in a cramped refrigerator.
Giovanna was – as one might assume – only apparently dead and is now in surprisingly good voice again. Any luck? Not quite, because her agent immediately reported the news of her sudden death to the press. Now Giovanna (with all the hysterics of an aging diva: Monica Bellucci) is waiting for the obituaries that will inevitably appear. A celebration of vanity that is supposed to help her get over the shock she has suffered. But instead only short messages appear with their name and age. This stuns her: “What does sixty mean? I just turned fifty-nine!”
Death cannot be transformed into a contemporary lifestyle; it cannot be optimized or embellished.
“Paris Paradise” by the Iranian-French director Marjane Satrapi is not a Paris film in the strictest sense, but a meditation on the things in life. She didn’t skimp on being crazy. Because you inevitably meet death at the most inopportune moments. Half a dozen parallel episodes revolve around the absurdities of our existence, behind which there is always a baroque memento mori. What a bizarre dance of death! Some try to suppress it, others celebrate it. The many plot threads all converge, albeit loosely, with the host of a morbid crime documentary show, Éduard Emmard (the epitome of saturated seriousness: André Dussolier); he is something like the eminence grise of media death.
After one of his broadcasts, a cemetery employee leads him to a remote crypt. He can hardly believe what he sees there: a high-tech coffin with a cell phone and emergency oxygen supply. The hope of preserving life becomes an absurd denial of death. Perhaps it is this message that holds the many episodes together: Death cannot be transformed into a zeitgeist lifestyle, it can neither be optimized nor beautified. Despite all progress, it remains the inevitable end of our individual existence.
Giovanna, the opera singer who has long since died to the public (she hasn’t performed for a long time), is in no way able to enjoy the life she has regained. She forbids any denial of the death report and just drinks all day long. But eventually she says goodbye to her former life as an opera diva and finds meaning in a simple life. When her husband Rafael (Eduardo Noriega), composer and conductor, suddenly collapses dead during an orchestra performance, she still makes her big appearance. She sings Tosca’s “Vissi d’arte” leaning over her dead husband on stage.
What is that? A collection of embarrassing cinematic gaffes? No, because surprisingly the scenic arc of “Paris Paradise” can withstand such caricatured pathos. This series of absurd falls from the self-dramatizing heaven of narcissism seems as comical as it is tragic. One could see this as a process of purification using slightly different – drastic – means.
There is the stuntman Mike (Ben Aldrigde), who, despite acting training, has only been doubling breakneck scenes in films for years. He lives as a single father to an adolescent boy who turns out to be overly fearful of life. When he has a bicycle accident, his existence as a stuntman is thrown into disarray. What is the point of putting your life at risk every day when you are urgently needed as a father?
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“Paris Paradise” turns out to be a cleverly composed stream of everyday particles from many people involved. For all of them, life doesn’t have what they hoped for. Like the make-up artist Badou (Gwendal Marimoutou), who just got kicked out of an undertaker because of his tendency to apply make-up too thickly. Now he is in the film and falls in love with the stuntman Mike, who doesn’t pay any attention to him.
A lot of characters, plot threads that are briefly picked up and then dropped again? You can see it that way, but there’s something about having so many actors revolve so skillfully around a theme. And some of them are just dominant, like Rossy de Palma as a chain-smoking grandmother who hates her son-in-law. She makes a pact with God or whoever: she is willing to give up one of her vices in order to live a little longer. But definitely not smoking.
Things get macabre when the depressed teenager Marie-Cerise is kidnapped from the bridge railing during a suicide attempt. A pervert ties her up and tortures her. But she has already scratched herself so much on all parts of her body that, despite her fear, she instinctively begins to disrupt his performance. The sadist’s sick self-image begins to waver and Marie-Cerise increasingly transforms him into a therapist according to her needs. One to whom she shouts what she never even whispers to anyone else. Very strange, very strange. But maybe that’s one of those things between life and death that not everyone has to understand.
Just like the self-image displayed by the calm death expert, the television presenter Emmard. In the end it breaks. After a routine check-up in the hospital, he struggles with his own suddenly darkened perspectives on life. What he has to say to us at the end indicates the philosophical dimension that fortunately always resonates in “Paris Paradise”: “Life is the totality of the chances of evading death every day.”
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