Les Olympiades

I can’t get Jacques Audiard’s latest film Les Olympiades (Paris 13th District in English, which is a frustrating translation because the original French title has far more nuanced meaning) out of my mind. The whole thing has a nothing-else-feels-quite-like-this aura. An addictively shimmering electronica soundtrack is slathered over high definition black and white imagery that flies above, around and through the broad streets of brutalist, tower-block Paris. This inhumanly-scaled cityscape, itself a paradox against the dreamscape image most of us have of Paris, pulses with the life of multicultural youth, arty slackers, second generation immigrants, aspiring intellectuals and postgrad students. Their hookups and crushes, disappointments and missed connections, aching desires and streetwise cynicism volley between romance and grief. Random entanglements begins to feel like fate, as in life itself, as they slowly blossom into dreamlike wish-fulfilment possibility. The acting is so good, so immediate, you feel like these Parisians are your loveably flawed new best friends. I find myself still rooting for them all, days after the screening, wondering how they’re getting on. I’ve seen this film twice and will go yet again, simply to bask in the way it uses the scale of the big screen and sleek, gliding-camera cinematography to express the everyday ecstasy of just being alive, and the miraculous wonder of stumbling into love.