We'll always have Paris.... said Plato

Eighteen film directors were recruited for a project centered in Paris, and each director was to make a film about love. This project became Paris Je T’aime, a modern cinematic Symposium. The films examine a diversity of types of love. In order to simplify this analysis the films chosen here specifically demonstrate romantic love. Still, it would be impossible, in the space allotted, to analyze all the films concerning romantic love from the collection. Instead, I will analyze three of the films; first on their ideas of love and second, on the relationship of their ideas with the perspectives presented in Plato’s Symposium.

The film Bastille is about a man who is going to leave his wife when she tells him that she has been diagnosed with terminal leukemia. The husband rises to the occasion, breaks up with his mistress, and tends to his wife in every way that she asks. Then the film ends with, “By acting like a man in love, he became a man in love again.”

In the beginning of the film he is irked by his wife’s mannerisms. Then death colors those mundane details with precious urgency. Knowing that she will die soon drives the husband to appreciate all the details that are unique to her, those things which irked him before. The narrator says that tending to each detail felt different, knowing he would never be able to do it for her again. Then as a result of directing all of this love towards her, he falls in love with her once more. The feelings of love are sustained by actions of love.

Love does not always mean being “in love.” The man leaves his “hot-blooded mistress” for his dying wife. He leaves a woman who was much more exciting and fun for a woman who he is bored with, who is dying, and who requires significant effort. The logic of contemporary love cannot grasp this. That seems to be too much effort and sacrifice than should be required of love. It seems to be too hard. Yet it is a sacrifice necessary for true love, according to the film.

Another film called Pere-Lachaise is about a couple visiting Paris a month before their wedding. They visit the headstone monument for Oscar Wilde, the woman’s favorite writer. She says she loves Wilde because he makes her laugh. Unlike her fiancé, a fact she also states. Her fiancé responds to her complaints with quips, but she takes them as insults and storms off. He trips and hits his head on the monument. Subsequently, a vision of Oscar Wilde encourages him to go after her. He does, and apologizes with two Wilde quotes. The couple is reunited. Love is apparently exemplified in the fact that the man runs after her and conforms to her desire for him to be like Oscar Wilde.

The woman’s complaints are “you’ve got to know when I’m lying,” and “why can’t you try to make me laugh.” She is unkind and self-centered and yet her expectations are fulfilled and justified by the conclusion of the film. Furthermore the whole while she is complaining that he cannot make her laugh he is responding with witty remarks. For example, as they stare at this monumental hunk of concrete covered in lipstick kisses, she says, “You know what Oscar Wilde’s last words were?” To which he responds, “Bury me under something ugly?” She glares in response. It is only at the end of the film when he precisely quotes Wilde twice that she laughs and forgives him. If the highest love in the Symposium is the love of the Beautiful, it would seem not in Love’s nature to require someone to be other than their best selves.

Another film of the collection that has a fascinating portrayal of romantic love is Quartier de la Madeleine. It is a short film about a man and a vampiress, who meet and fall in love and end up sucking the life from one another eternally. This film seemed to be a combination of Phaedrus and Aristophanes’s speeches on love. Aristophanes encourages the finding of one’s soul mate and then latching on and refusing to let go. That is precisely what happens in the film. The vampiress threatens the man but decides not to bite him. He feebly tries to tempt her to bite him by slicing open his wrist. The extreme blood loss causes him to faint and fall down a flight of stone stairs, cracking his head open. Then she flutters to his rescue, feeding him her own blood, thereby turning him into a vampire. Then the undead couple latch on to each others necks and suck lustily. As far as the characters were concerned they were matching halves, made whole by the transformation of the man into a vampire.

There are also overtones of Phaedrus’s speech in Quartier de la Madeleine. Phaedrus says love is deeply, purely romantic, and often strongly sexual. The couple’s longing for each other is directly related to vampiric lust for blood. Their passionate desire for one another is a prime example of the intensity of Phaedrus’s deep romanticism.

The vast expanse of Paris Je T’aime is daunting to analyze however, there are three of the films examined in light of the Symposium. Three more will be analyzed after the second viewing, perhaps looking at a different category of love portrayed. With the diversity of love presented in Paris Je T’aime it is important not to fall into the misunderstandings of Phaedrus and Pausanias, love is not only romantic, sexual love. It is more multifaceted than that. Yet it seems that Aristophanes, Agathon, and Phaedrus gave speeches correlating to aspects of human experience that have not changed in the thousands of years that separate us from them. Stories that we keep repeating.