72 THENEWYORKER, APRIL 18, 2022THE CURRENT CINEMARESTLESS
“Paris, 13th District” and “Ambulance.”BYANTHONY LANEILLUSTRATION BY ADAMS CARVALHOH
igh above the streets of Paris, the
camera stirs. Surveying the shapes
of buildings, and gazing through win-
dows at the lives being led within, it
slowly descends, until we arrive at one
young woman, and the sound of sing-
ing. Such was the opening shot of René
Clair’s wonderful “Under the Roofs of
Paris” (1930), and now, nearly a centurylater, the same thing happens at the be-
ginning of “Paris, 13th District,” the lat-
est film from Jacques Audiard. Plus ça
change. Just to deepen the echo, the new
movie is—apart from one brief burst of
color—in black-and-white. The only
difference is that the woman in 1930,
fully dressed, is invited to join in the
communal chorus of a song, whereas
today’s heroine, Émilie (Lucie Zhang),
is naked, sprawled on a couch, and
crooning solo into a microphone.
The throb of the distant past is worth
attending to, because in many respects
“Paris, 13th District” appears—and as-
pires—to be a fable for our era. Almost
all the characters are youthful, moving
in and out of rented accommodations
and restlessly switching jobs. Relation-ships, too, are splintered and fleeting,
some of them started and finished in
less time than it takes to eat an entrée.
One evening, Émilie, who is waitress-
ing, pauses to check her cell phone,
likes the look of the man she sees there,
asks a colleague to cover for her while
she runs an errand, hurries home, has
sex with the man, and returns to therestaurant to resume normal service.
Tinder is the night.
What springs from this sequence,
against expectation, is joy. Check out
Émilie’s sly mid-coital smile, and the
dance that she can’t help breaking into
as she goes back to work, and that Au-
diard films in rapturous slow motion.
(Even the diners applaud, as if feeding
on her bliss.) Rather than frowning
on her fecklessness, or diagnosing a
case of anomie, he simply lays out the
tactics of the modern thrill-seeker for
our perusal. When Émilie, fired up
on MDMA and embracing a perfect
stranger at a club, pauses mid-smooch
to announce, “I love this,” who are we
to disagree, still less to judge?
Émilie, whose family is Taiwanese,and who slips to and fro between Man-
darin and French, is in luck. She lives
for free in an apartment belonging to
her grandmother, who is in an old peo-
ple’s home, and earns easy cash by tak-
ing in a lodger. Her first roommate is
a guy named Camille (Makita Samba),
a high-school teacher, who is tall, Black,
and handsome; he and Émilie, obey-
ing an etiquette that they both take for
granted, immediately sleep together as
a prelude to living together. “Start with
the highest attraction level. It takes lon-
ger to fade,” he says, as if measuring
magnetic forces in a laboratory. (At one
point, she leaves his bed and goes to
her own room, whereupon he picks up
Rousseau’s “Confessions” and starts to
read. We are, after all, in France.) Sure
enough, they are soon dating elsewhere.
Camille—who has quit teaching in
favor of pursuing a doctorate, and has
meanwhile found employment as a real-
estate agent—becomes involved with
a colleague, Nora (Noémie Merlant),
who went back to studying, at the age
of thirty-three, and then changed her
mind. The carrousel continues to spin.
“Paris, 13th District”—the original
and more redolent title is “Les Olympi-
ades,” named for the towering projects
on the southern rim of the city—is writ-
ten by Audiard, in league with Léa My-
sius and Céline Sciamma, the director
of “Girlhood” (2015) and “Portrait of a
Lady on Fire” (2019). The plot arises from
three stories by the graphic novelist and
cartoonist Adrian Tomine, whose work
has often graced this magazine. The re-
sult is less an adaptation of a comic book
than a cross-pollination—the best and
most fertile of its kind, I’d say, since David
Cronenberg’s “A History of Violence”
(2005). Notice not only what Audiard
has altered but what he has chosen to
omit. “Killing and Dying,” for instance,
Tomine’s tale of an aspiring standup
comic, is pared down to a subplot about
Camille’s sister, Éponine (Camille Léon-
Fucien). If she ever tries out her mate-
rial onstage, we never see it.
The most melancholic saga, in the
movie as on the page, concerns Amber
Sweet ( Jehnny Beth). That is the nom
de porn of an online performer, famed
as a cam girl, who, by mere chance, is a
dead ringer for Nora. The coincidence
comes to the attention of Nora’s fellow-
students, who believe, to their glee, thatNoémie Merlant, Lucie Zhang, and Makita Samba star in Jacques Audiard ’s film.