Starring: Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, Emmanuelle Riva, Pierre Richard
Distributor: Limelight Films
Runtime: 83 mins. Reviewed in Jun 2018
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Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon are something of a cinema treasure and, like much treasure, has not been open to the public. A great pity. They made some short films but their features, Rumba and The Fairy, would go on many audiences lists after they see Lost in Paris – the French title more evocative, Barefoot in Paris.
The two have been married since the 1980s, meeting through their love of the Circus. Belgium is their base. However, Fiona Gordon is actually Canadian but was born in Australia. She is obviously proudly Canadian because Canada and her character as a Canadian feature strongly in Lost in Paris.
The film is a droll comedy. However, audiences searching for raucous comedies should not look here. These films are much more subtle even when a lot of the action is slapstick. It is as if they were paying homage to the silent comedies and the type of comic performances from the time of Chaplin and Buster Keaton. The acting is quite stylised, quite a lot of mime, comic postures, exaggerated situations (early in the piece, a door is opened to an office during a blizzard and everybody performs in mime being blown at precarious angles on their chairs by the blizzard, covered in snow, resuming normal positions when the door is finally able to be shut).
There are words in the film and there is a reliance on music, from Shostakovich to Erik Satie and more contemporary songs. However, the delight is in the stylised performances, not only of the central characters, of so many of the others during the action. They include a Canadian Mountie in Paris whom Fiona keeps encountering, her aunt’s exasperated neighbour at the laundromat looking for his socks, and a nurse caring for the elderly, a group of diners in fashionable restaurant (who keep bouncing in their seats as the sound system booms).
Fiona comes from Canada to seek her aunt in Paris, goes through an extraordinary number of adventures including falling into the River Seine, twice. Her aunt is played by veteran actress Emmanuelle Riva (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Leon Morin Priest and, Oscar-nominated in her 80s for Amour). She enters vigorously into the character of the ageing lady, not quite with it. At one stage she meets Norman, played by veteran French comic actor, Pierre Richard. There is a delightful interlude when they are sitting on a park bench, the music starts, and the focus is on the pair of feet tapping in time to the music and an entertaining choreography.
Speaking of choreography, there is also a delightful dance sequence in the fashionable restaurant showing that while Dominique and Fiona can do very awkward comedy, their dancing and movement has great finesse.
Dom lives on the street, in the tent, scrounging garbage bins, coming across some of Fiona’s goods and backpack, surfacing on the Seine, and, by chance, encounters her at the restaurant. They are attracted but not willing to acknowledge it. They have a number of adventures, especially getting to the aunt’s funeral – only to find that it is not the aunt. So, the destination of the film, though they are lost in Paris in some ways, is to find the aunt and a happy, if comic ending.
One of the best things about the screenplay is that small details at various times become very important in the later development of the plot.
Most of the action seems to take place on the Right Bank of the Seine – but, Fiona gives more meaning to the word gauche in her character.
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