LOST IN PARIS (2016)
Directed by Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon
Oscilloscope Laboratories, 83 minutes, NR
(In English and French with subtitles)
★★ 1/2
Forget the Hollywood rating
system. In the age of the Internet, users rate movies as OMG, LOL, or POS. Lost in Paris suggests we ought to add a
WTF category. It may not be the campiest film ever made, but its tents are in
the front row of the bivouac grounds. Its charm is that it’s quirky and strange;
its weakness is that both qualities are served in gluttonous portions.
Let me set the tone by
describing the opening scene. The camera looks down upon a village encased in
apocalyptic amounts of snow. We gaze upon a quite obvious toy-sized set before
we are taken inside a library where Fiona (Fiona Gordon) sits behind a desk
looking like she is where fashion went to die. Then we are treated to a gag
torn from the pages of the W.C. Fields film A
Fatal Glass of Beer (1933). A door opens, fake snow flies everywhere, and
the wind blasts with such force that everyone and everything is blown sideways.
The door closes and all returns to normal. And by ‘normal,’ I mean absurd. Cue
some Canadian accents.
The person entering the room
delivers a soiled letter that was accidentally thrown into a garbage can rather
than placed in the post box. It’s from Fiona’s elderly aunt Martha (Emmanuel
Riva), a once-famous dancer but now 88 years old and trying to keep French
authorities from squirreling her away in a nursing home. (She has a unique way
of dodging authorities and it’s one of many reoccurring jokes.) So it’s off to
Paris for Fiona, who apparently has never been off the tundra before.
If you plan on watching this
film, surrender all logic right now, as things are about to get so absurd they
would make Eugene Ionesco check into rehab. We next see Fiona in Paris, her
stick-like figure crammed into a clingy green dress, a pair of cheap tennis
shoes upon her feet, her face framed by glasses dubbed ugly by Geeks United,
her hair crimped and curled by a mad hairdresser, and hefting an enormous orange
backpack. Cut to the next visual joke—it takes a contortionist to get it
through the Metro turnstile. Oh—the backpack is also flying a Canadian flag
from its frame.
The best way to describe the
rest of the film is to say everything gets sillier and that its loose (as in very loose) structure is built around
miscommunications, misassumptions, misfortunes, mistaken identities,
misconnections, slapstick routines, and repeated jokes. Among the latter are
setups involving Martha’s escapes from French authorities, a neighbor’s missing
sock, chance encounters with a Mountie, a persistent dog, an even more
persistent street bum (Dominique Abel), and the McGarrigle sisters singing
Loudon Wainwright III’s “Swimming Song.”* That song reoccurs because people and
things have a habit of falling into the Seine, with the objects resurfacing
later in hands other than those that first dropped them.
Gordon plays the gal from
snowy Hicksville set adrift in the City of Light with wide-eyed fascination and
goofy desperation. She is literally lost when separated from her backpack,
clothing, money, and passport, but gains the bum Dom, who won’t leave her alone
and whom she finds alternately annoying, useful, and kinda cute. (Physically he
puts one in mind of Roberto Benigni.)** Most of the action is set along the
Seine, at Pont Grenelle (where there is a smaller version of Auguste
Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty), at the Père Lachaise Cemetery, and atop the
Eiffel Tower.
Really, though, neither the
plot nor action is much more than an excuse to string together gags and surreal
situational comedy. At its best, Lost in
Paris evokes the preposterousness of Jacques Tati and the nimble-footed
physical routines of Harold Lloyd, though far too often it’s like a cloying old
Jerry Lewis vehicle or one of those painful Saturday
Night Live sketches that went on twice as long as it should have.
I probably would have walked
out had I been in a theater and I contemplated switching off the DVD at least
half a dozen times. So what kept me in my lounge chair? Lost in Paris is indeed a WTF film. It’s so odd that I found myself
watching like a voyeur at a disaster scene. Just when I thought I couldn’t take
anymore, something utterly charming occurred—like Riva chancing upon Norman
(Pierre Richard), an old dance partner and lover, and doing an impromptu seated
soft shoe routine, he in a hospital gown and ancient shoes, and she in cast-off
clothing, wool socks, and Birkenstocks. There are also situations akin to those
in the old Airplane movies that are
just so dumb you can’t resist them, though you feel guilty as hell afterward. I
mean, can one not watch slapstick
inside a crematorium?
After a time I admired the
moxie of Abel and Gordon for being able to poke so much fun at themselves. Their
physicality is also impressive, as evidenced in everything from pratfalls to an
impromptu tango. If you can put yourself in the mood for wall-to-wall
silliness, I can give this a qualified recommendation. It’s unlikely you will
view anything weirder in 2018, so score one for uniqueness. I’m glad though,
that Riva got to make one film before she died in early 2017. It looks like she
had fun in Lost in Paris, but I
wouldn’t want this fart cushion of a movie to be the last for such an important
icon of French cinema.
Rob Weir
* That makes more sense than
most things in the film. Kate McGarrigle was once married to Wainwright.
** In life, Gordon and Abel
are married. She’s actually Australian and he’s Belgian.
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