Paris, 13th District directed by Jacques Audiard
Lately, when friends tell me about some problem they’re having in their lives, they tend to add little caveats. “I could’ve been on the front lines this whole time, so it certainly could be worse!” Dan tells me after sharing that he’s exhausted from virtual teaching. Annie, who’s been on the academic job market for the better part of a year and applied to over a hundred positions, tells me the situation is “merely stressful.” She’s not yet worried about how she’s going to make rent—she just really wants a steady job. The past two years have thrown the world’s enormous problems into high relief. We are so completely aware of how bad some people have it, that we’ve developed a reflex to minimize our own issues.
It’s not a bad thing, of course, to keep matters in perspective. When I hear from someone that “things could be worse,” I understand the phrase as an attempt to resist the urge to catastrophize or exaggerate, to telegraph self-awareness, to dispel unnecessary worry. On this last front it rarely succeeds: I wonder what internal anguish the speaker is ignoring by turning his or her gaze outward. Acknowledging the suffering of the teacher who never had the option of Zoom school or of the academic in need of a steady gig to pay the bills, acute as it may be, is ultimately a way to avoid looking at the particular contours of our own pain. We turn the gaze outward and find abstraction and relief. We turn the gaze inward and find clarity—and agony.
So it goes for the characters in Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District (its French title, Les Olympiades, alludes to the neighborhood’s infamous modernist high-rises), who are in equal measure consumed by their internal struggles but also unwilling to face the true contours of their problems, to fully understand them so as to move through them. Shot almost entirely in black-and-white, Paris holds its audience at the same distance that its characters put between themselves and their inner worlds. A thin veil of abstraction always falls between the two, the monochrome effect achieving what the film’s characters repeatedly attempt, to varying degrees of success: it does away with detail.
The first encounter between two of the three protagonists, in fact, occurs because Émilie (Lucie Zhang, in her acting debut) has neglected to include a crucial detail in her ad for a roommate: she’s only looking to share her apartment with another woman. When Camille (Makita Samba), a man with a name that could be a woman’s, shows up, Émilie is surprised. She wants to reject him, but no. Something—maybe a kernel of sexual tension between them, maybe Camille’s explications (“I teach near here,” “This location would be really perfect”), likely a combination of both— prevents her from turning him away, and soon they are living, and sleeping, together.
Was Émilie’s omission of her gender requirements a purposeful manipulation or an oversight? As she and Camille engage in a relationship made complicated by their inability to unearth their own reasons to be with each other, it becomes clear that Émilie might not even know the answer to that question herself. Meanwhile, Camille appears to be more immediately aware of his motivations for being with Émilie: he tells her he channels his professional frustration into his sex life. But while that seems true, he’s also, we later find out, running from the pain of his mother’s recent death. He’s mentioned it to no one, but when a woman comes to buy the mother’s wheelchair, Camille bursts into a teary rage. All that channeling seems to have gone nowhere.
In a parallel story line (the two later intersect), Nora (Noémie Merlant), a smart and somewhat provincial woman from Bordeaux recently transplanted to Paris to attend law school wears a blond wig to a party and is mistaken for a camgirl named Amber Sweet. Rumors start spreading that she is indeed Amber, and Nora can neither confront nor ignore them. In a climactic scene, the voices of her gossiping classmates thunder around her while she tries to speak during class. She breaks under their pressure and abandons law school, never bothering to consider why the confusion and rumors bothered her so deeply. There is something there she cannot face.
Scene after scene, we see our protagonists turning away from themselves, away from what really ails them. All of this unfolds against an alienating architectural backdrop: towers whose repetitive facades belie the potential diversity of their inhabitants, an esplanade that carries pedestrians high above street level, streetscapes that read monotonous and blank. We get a feeling of place-specificity through shots of building exteriors and rooftops—the film opens by panning over the rooftops of the Olympiades shopping mall, known at the Pagoda—and the camerawork also gives the impression that the world is closing in around the protagonists, tight and suffocating. Audiard colors this sense of estrangement with an overtone of entrapment through closely cropped interior shots that flatten foreground and background, showing the characters suspended inside small worlds, each of them in a separate isolation.
It’s the same off-screen. The world around us is infinitely heavy, laden with problems too great for any of us to solve yet alluring in their seeming capacity to absorb the projections of our worries. We can deflect into it again and again; there are endless avenues for distraction. Camille’s and Émilie’s and Nora’s attempts to turn away from themselves feel familiar. I see them not only in my friends’ anecdotes about their own life, but also in popular culture in general, where the post-2016 wave of politicization has given all of us more confidence to talk about the world, but rarely more avenues to change it. When everything is on fire, why worry about the little ember of a problem inside you? We seem to believe, as Camille, Nora, and Émilie do, that our inner struggles are not worth facing. Audiard seems to believe, instead, that they are important enough to fill a whole screen.