After the tonal uncertainties of his English-language western flop The Sisters Brothers, French writer-director Jacques Audiard finds himself back on home ground with this intertwining tale of love and desire in the digital age. Having earned Baftas for the neo-noir The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) and the bone-shaking A Prophet (2010) and won the Palme d’Or with the gripping Tamil-refugee drama Dheepan (2015), Audiard is in altogether more incidental spirits for this bittersweet affair, which flirts with the modern romcom genre while cheekily flipping the themes of Eric Rohmer’s My Night With Maud.
The imposing towers of the Olympiades, the high-rise neighbourhood in Paris’s 13th arrondissement from which the film takes its French title, provide the backdrop for an elusively chaptered roundelay of stories. First, we meet Émilie (Lucie Zhang), a Chinese-French science graduate who, despite her qualifications, is kicking her heels in menial jobs such as telesales and waitressing. Émilie’s apartment belongs to her grandmother, who has Alzheimer’s and is now living in a nearby nursing home. Yet Émilie rarely visits, even assuaging her guilt by asking a supposed doppelganger to act as her stand-in, convinced her gran won’t know the difference. As for her mother’s phone calls from Taiwan, Émilie cuts them short, keeping everything at a distance.
When teacher Camille (Makita Samba) presents himself at Emilie’s door as a potential rent-paying flatmate, the pair almost immediately fall into bed. Emilie is smitten, the arrogant Camille less so. “We’re not a couple,” he says before bringing home another lover, blithely declaring that “attraction fades” and that: “You’re in love; I’m not.”
Next, via an apparently brief detour into the startlingly colourful sex-cam world of Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth), we hook up with Nora (Portrait of a Lady on Fire star Noémie Merlant) who has moved from Bordeaux to pick up her studies in Paris. “I can see the Seine from my window!” she says delightedly before heading to class, where the younger students react dismissively to her thirtysomething presence. Later, a party wig causes Nora to be mistaken for Amber and she promptly finds herself the subject of mobile-phone-powered sex-shaming ridicule. So grotesque is the experience (which Audiard stages with near-gothic inflections) that Nora abandons her studies and becomes an estate agent, a twist that brings her into contact first with the ever-seductive Camille and then, more importantly, with Amber, who proves to be an unexpected soulmate.
Audiard describes the stories of American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine from which he drew inspiration as being “filled with whimsy and melancholy”. The same is true of the film, for which Audiard called upon Céline Sciamma, creator of such flawless gems as Girlhood and Petite Maman, and Léa Mysius, who made 2017’s Ava, to collaborate on the screenplay. Crisply photographed by Paul Guilhaume, and presented in a romantic urban monochrome that recalls the vistas of Manhattan, this is a playfully sensuous affair that wonders what happens to slow-burn intimacy when mediated by the urgency of the online world. Mobile phones and computer screens are constant companions, bringing people together in strange and unexpected ways, whether it’s the dating apps that Émilie uses to feed her immediate needs or the pay-per-view porn sites through which Nora ironically finds a human connection.
Crucially, there’s nothing judgmental about the script, which takes pleasure in confounding technophobic expectations. While digital communication may allow everyone to live in their own isolated box, it’s interesting how many of the film’s most genuinely intimate moments play out at one remove. In one scene, a couple “sleep together” thanks to the miracle of web-cam technology. In another, the thrill of a repeated declaration of love is amplified by being delivered down a door-intercom phone.
Hats off to the ensemble cast for making these highly choreographed shenanigans seem as natural as they do and to French electronic music composer Erwan Castex, AKA Rone, who was joint winner of the best soundtrack award at Cannes last year and who provides the bittersweet beat to which Audiard’s film skips.
