Multiplicitous Love

            Plato used six men to give six speeches about Love as understood within the Greek cultural context. The collaborators of Paris Je T’aime used over eighteen film directors to create eighteen “speeches” about Love in the contemporary Parisian context. Each director has their own personal experiences of Love weighing on them as they approach the task of creating a short film about love in Paris. At the beginning of the collection the text on the screen indicates that it is a collection of “little neighborhood romances.” That is their specific task, all twenty-something directors.

It is obvious that mathematically at least one of the Paris films should pair well with each of the Symposium’s speeches. However, that is not the case. More unfortunately than that, I have to examine my own words about the love in Lars being a reinvention, being a new voice in the conversation about Love. If my assertion were true the love in Lars should appear somewhere in Paris, as it is a kind of contemporary international Symposium. It is not there though. There are trace elements of it in some of the films, where love is for the sake of others, sacrificial, persistent, and gracious, but mostly it is not there.

The film “Bastille,” that I discussed in a previous essay, is the closest of the Paris collection to expressing the kind of love in Lars. The husband loves his wife beyond the barrier emotional estrangement. In a similar way, Lars’s family loves him even though they cannot really relate with him and his condition bewilders them. Yet this connection is a slight stretch to connect the love in Lars to the love in Paris because the stretch thins out the love in Lars, and loses its robustness. On top of this, that is only in one film out of eighteen. I think I was mistaken when I said that the love in Lars is a new voice in the conversation on love. At least within the contemporary cinema conversation, it almost completely lacks presence. This does not, however, negate my statement that the love in Lars is a reinvention of love added to the general human conversation on love, since Symposium was written.

Therefore, “Love one another,” community-founded preserving of the Beauty and the Good for someone else’s sake, is a love that has been spoken this side of Symposium. It is in this sense that it is a new voice to the conversation. I was incorrect to assert that it has any substantive presence in the current cinematic conversation. The various kinds of love in Paris represent the voices of that current conversation and Lars is not really a part of it. Neither, however, is Twilight. There are a couple films that tiptoe about Aristophanes’s speech but none of them are as melodramatically blatant about soul mates as the angsty staring and “you’re made for me” vocabulary of Twilight.

Though Twilight was wildly popular in the box office, it does not seem to be a part of the international cinematic conversation about Love. It is important to note that the directors who created the Paris films are not necessarily the common people who eagerly consumed Twilight time after time at the box office. A differentiation in “conversations” is important then. There is the general human conversation of love, essentially meaning the ideas that are currently floating around about love. Some may be more popular than others but that success in generally assessed by box office statistics. There is also the cinematic conversation, which occasionally overlaps with the general conversation when commercialism and box office monies are the goal of a film. The directors of Paris are not interested in making the most popular film about love. They are not concerned with box office gross income or the commercialism of an idea because they were chosen to create a short film for an independent style collection. Essentially, the artistes who created those films were more occupied with presenting their ideas of Paris and love than what would sell the most tickets. This is precisely the reason why I believe Paris to be an effective representation of an international cinematic Symposium. It is also why it is important to note the lack of Lars and Twilight in the collection. The international conversation on love is, instead, like the men of the Symposium more occupied with demonstrating the gifts of love rather than what it is. That is why the films cover a diversity of “loves” as love in a variety of different relational contexts. The differences in the manifestations of love do not separate it into different species of love. It is merely executed differently. Paris sees love as one might worship many gods, attempting to satisfy each kind by a different offering. Love is many-faceted but more like a well cut diamond than a brooch with many jewels.