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.
