Paris, 13th District

Director: Jacques Audiard

11 September 2023

See

Him: Anything Jacques Audiard and I’m in. Les Olympiades (the 13th district of Paris) is very different, not serious, dark nor about crime with social commentary. It was co-written by Celine Sciamma and bears her signature intimate observations of relationships.

Emile (Lucie Zhang) works in a call center, is beautiful but disaffected, subletting a room she meets Camille (Makita Samba) a teacher and ambitious guy, also of an immigrant background, young and sexy. They click, have sex, but that’s just the beginning of modern romance which puts Closer (directed by Mike Nicols) to shame. Nora (Noemie Merlant) brilliant in Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire and off the back of Western cinema success with Tar, is a second year law student who drops out after being bullied for looking like Amber (Jehnny Beth) a cam girl she befriends. They all live in Olympiades on Paris’ periphery. 

Her: Les Olympiades (13th District) by Jacques Audiard, 2021/ Emile is in love with Camille, who is in love with Nora, who is in love with Cecile, better known as webcam star Amber Sweet. They all live  or at some point find themselves in the 13th district of Paris and are trying to find themselves personally and romantically. 

Think

Him: Everybody fucks everybody. But no one gets fucked over. A subtle but important distinction in modern relationships. THey stay friends and their relationships change form. You see more to the characters, the pressure Emile feels from her Taiwanese parents, to visit her grandma with Alzheimer’s disease in a nursing home nearby when she’s trying to figure out who to be herself. She shines a multilingual, and when partying and dancing and having sex. 

Camille stays busy and gets another job running a real estate agency where he hires experienced Nora. At first she sets boundaries, he pursues her but even when they’re intimate physically she’s distant emotionally, only building rapport slowly with Amber over skype. 

Her: Audiard is exploring modern love and all of its new challenges in his most recent film. This love, seemingly more free then ever before encounters new challenges. As always, the characters here are far from being perfect, all have skeletons in their closet, they fall and rise again, just like we all do. Audiard does not favor anyone and finds resolutions that may not be perfect but are very believable. 

Feel

Him: The ending was great, it reminded me of Pablo Larrain’s Ema. Young love might look different and seem scary and confusing, but they’ll figure it out. The most touching scenes to me were Camille with his father and sister. He’s still trying to help and keep busy by controlling. But actually listening to his sister’s stand up comedy and how she doesn’t stutter when on stage, or the revelation when he breaks down when re-selling his deceased mother’s wheel chair made his walls finally come down, ad let romantic love in.

Her: Of all the characters Emile is my favourite. She is the one with the least ambition, a black sheep in her family and does not really stand out in any way, but she is humble and fierce and is not afraid to confront and ask for what she wants. The only storyline I struggle to believe in is Nora and Cecile’s falling in love with each other (I suspect this was Celine Sciamma’s idea), I would probably prefer them to stay just friends. But maybe that’s because I’m not gay.