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PREMIERE.COM'S REVIEW (posted 8/10/07)

The most fashionably timeless of all hipster film movements, the Nouvelle Vague is always en vogue. While the world can never be taken breathless by Godard and his peers for the first time again, there's still something breathtaking about this melodically melancholic homage to the French New Wave and the City of Lights herself. Now, if the team of writer-director Honoré and rising star Garrel scared you off with 2004's notorious Georges Bataille adaptation Ma Mère — in which The Dreamers thespian is last seen perched over his dead mother's body while, um, pleasuring himself to a Turtles song — don't fear. The soul of Dans Paris is Honoré's humane corrective on familial relationships, this time a brotherly love that may or may not be enough to pull someone out of a crippling depression. Given the film's nostalgic swagger, it may seem easy to question Honoré's sincerity in mashing the aesthetic liberties of a bygone, sacred-cow era with an achingly naturalistic tale of fetal-position despair. Call that balanced, bipolar, or even just absurd; Honoré has cleared himself in creating a work as modernly poignant as it is retro-seductive.

Smoky jazz bounces over the opening credits like in Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows, and the first of Tropical Malady cinematographer Jean-Louis Vialard's killer compositions achieves vibrancy with largely neutral colors. Bounding out of bed, floppy-haired goofball Jonathan (Garrel, evoking Jean-Pierre Léaud in some early Truffaut pic) stumbles out onto an incredible balcony view (Stolen Kisses?) and temporarily busts down the fourth wall to tell us this film is about his brooding bro, not him: "Is it possible for a love story to make us jump off a bridge?"

In spatially skewed, time-hopping, and therefore Rivette-like flashbacks, said brother and furry photographer Paul (Duris, The Beat That My Heart Skipped) and his girlfriend Anna (Preiss) are depicted only through their fiery arguments. (Contempt? A Woman is a Woman? You get the point.) These exchanges paint a troubled but incomplete portrait of the break-up that causes Paul to move back home with his divorced dad and younger sibling. There he lies in bed, an open wound the size of a man, his middle-class family trying to cheer him up in time for Christmas, as if heartache could be overcome with chicken-soup ministrations. On the manic side of "in love," Jonathan is soon wandering the streets of Paris, hooking up with three different beauties in a single trip to the Bon Marché window displays — while shuffling around the apartment, Paul flicks his cell phone off a ledge as his father worries he'll jump. The emotions tumble back and forth in each new scene, in which the two brothers are each governed by hopeless passions that the other can't comprehend or help.

Where Dans Paris truly pops, besides its spot-on leads or the slick curation of its fashions and locales, are in its mood-mixing musical moments. An early, long-held shot where Anna dances topless with Paul is pure sultriness that gets quietly devastating when the song ends, and his disinterested retreat to a chair embarrasses her into covering up. Paul gets out of his funk at one point, if only for a couple of minutes, thanks to an unexpectedly infectious sing-a-long to Kim Wilde's "Cambodia." And in an ode to Jacques Demy, the ex-lovers perform an over-the-phone duet that ambiguously represents either closure or a second chance, depending on how euphoric you've let your own romantic spirit become by now.

— Aaron Hillis