Six in Paris


Paris vu par... is a French anthology film made in 1965.

Cast & Segments

"Saint-Germain-des-Prés" Directed by Jean Douchet
Segment about an American girl student taken in by a French playboy and gets wise to another's ways. Director Douchet was at the time, like Eric Rohmer, a freshly resigned critic from Cahiers du Cinema best known later for book on Hitchcock.
"Gare du Nord" Directed by Jean Rouch
Segment shows the influence of documentary and 16 mm by Rouch. Also notably uses almost one long hand-held continuous take, following Odile from a breakfast table argument with her boyfriend, whom she is bored and irritated by into the street where she meets a mysterious man. The man seems to be the answer to all her complaints and wants her to go away with him but for otherwise saying he will kill himself if she does not.
"Rue Saint-Denis" Directed by Jean-Daniel Pollet
Format again inflects form in Jean Daniel Pollet's segment with comedy as real-world stage actress Michelline Dax plays the worldly Parisian prostitute broadly as she kindheartedly makes fun of her inexperienced customer. Melki, like a few New Wave actors, riffs on Buster Keaton in nod to a tradition of shorts being comedies in the role.
"Place de l'Etoile" Directed by Eric Rohmer
Some would later identify this as uncharacteristically Rohmer neglecting his writing on silent comedy. The short plays upon the confusion around the Arc de Triomphe in Paris embodied by the character Jean-Marc as deftly shot by Nestor Almendros. In going to and from work the character mistakenly believes that he has killed a man in a rude encounter and tries to dodge location and responsibility.
"Montparnasse-Levallois" Directed by Jean-Luc Godard
Segment interprets the news story that Alfred Lubitsch reads to Angela in a restaurant in A Woman Is a Woman.  Itself based on a Jean Giraudoux story "La Méprise" with the genders reversed in the film where two women receive the letters mistakenly sent by their lover to the wrong person. Notably shot by American documentarian Albert Maysles, not Raoul Coutard, showing the woman's plight, Monica, to retrieve and amend the letters she sent.
"La Muette" Directed by Claude Chabrol
Known for his Hitchcockian 'horror-beneath-the-bourgeois-surface' exposed on film, director Claude Chabrol himself plays the 'bourgeois' father here with his then-wife Stephane Audran as the mother of a mischievous boy who starts putting ear-plugs in his ears to keep from hearing their constant arguments playfully exploiting the critical-laden term diegesis.