Parisian Love Stories for the Age of Talk Less, Message More

Midway through “Paris, 13th District,” the new film directed by Jacques Audiard, Émilie sneaks away from her job waitressing in a Chinese restaurant to hook up with a man she’s found on a dating app. When she returns from the encounter, she is so filled with happiness that she dances through the aisles as the customers applaud.

It’s a joyful moment among the tumultuous stories of love and sex Audiard weaves together to form a distinctly contemporary picture of Parisian romance. The young characters, including Émilie, fall into bed with new partners after barely speaking and live in high-rises that look like they could be in Mexico City or Seattle. Neither the Eiffel Tower nor the Notre-Dame cathedral make an appearance.

“I wanted to examine the state of the modern romantic discourse,” Audiard, 69, said in a recent video interview, adding that the subject “is often judged in a negative, maybe reactionary way by people from my generation, that for young people doesn’t make any sense.”

As elsewhere, dating apps have become popular in France in recent years, including platforms like Happn, Tinder and Fruitz, an app that allows users to use depictions of fruit to signal their dating intentions. The use of such apps has surged in Europe in the last three years, according to Sensor Tower, a digital analytics firm, likely driven in part by isolation during the continent’s pandemic lockdowns.

Audiard said he wanted to create a counterpoint to the stories that had shaped his own conceptions of love and intimacy, in particular the films of the New Wave director Eric Rohmer. He singled out “My Night at Maud’s,” a 1969 classic in which a man and a woman have a lengthy conversation about love, religion and other existential themes without ultimately consummating their romantic tension.

“The film really marked me,” Audiard said, arguing that it had served as a romantic education for him and other young people about how to use words as a mode of seduction. But he said that he believed the discourse had now shifted. “There’s now the principle that people will have sex immediately, and I wanted to see what possibilities come afterward,” he said.

In one of the film’s early scenes, for instance, Camille, a handsome teacher, responds to Émilie’s ad looking for a roommate. Although she initially rebuffs him, they quickly undress. Before long, they are both roommates and in a casual sexual relationship — an arrangement that leads, unsurprisingly, to emotional complications. “At the start of the film, the characters are very self-confident, but they are not who they think they are,” Audiard said.

While Émilie (the newcomer Lucie Zhang) grapples with her family’s unhappiness about her lack of an aspirational job, Camille (Makita Samba) tries to compensate for his professional frustrations through sex. He then meets Nora (Noémie Merlant), a 30-something university student who is bullied by her classmates after they mistake her for a cam-sex performer.

For people familiar with Audiard’s past work, the film’s low-key, tender tone might come as a surprise. The director, whose films have won numerous awards at the Cannes Film Festival, is best known for intense, often violent features, including “A Prophet” and “Dheepan,” which won the festival’s Palme d’Or award in 2015.

Audiard co-wrote the screenplay for “Paris, 13th District” with the directors Céline Sciamma (“Portrait of a Lady on Fire” and “Petite Maman”) and Léa Mysius.

The film, which is loosely adapted from three stories by the American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, takes its title from its setting in the Olympiads, a neighborhood of high-rises and walkways in the southeast of Paris that was built as an urban renewal project in the 1960s.

Tomine said in a recent interview he had been “flattered” that his stories, which he described as “very California,” had proved adaptable to a contemporary French context and that they “have universal qualities that I had not been aware of.”

By setting the film among the Olympiads’ modernist architecture, Audiard said, and shooting it in black and white, he aimed to reinforce the sense that he was telling a different kind of story set in the French capital. “I wanted to create a distance from the romantic Paris you know,” he said, explaining hat he saw the city’s historical center as a kind of “museum.” The neighborhood is also known for its diversity, including large Chinese and Vietnamese communities.

Zhang, who had never acted in a feature film before answering a casting notice for the project she had seen on Instagram, has a personal connection to the neighborhood: Her parents, both immigrants from China, first met there. The actress, who is studying business at a Parisian university and was 19 when she auditioned for the role, said in an interview that she was undaunted by the project’s nudity and sexual content.

As part of the film’s preproduction, Audiard had his main cast watch “My Night at Maud’s,” among other films, and, to prepare Samba and Zhang for their intense sex scenes, the casting director instructed them to improvise scenes in the nude.

Zhang added that her family, which had previously been skeptical of her acting ambitions, had become supportive when the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year. “Though the first time my mom saw the film, she told me there were a few moments I wasn’t acting so well and that I could improve,” she said.

In another of the film’s story lines, Nora develops an unusually meaningful emotional bond with a cam-sex performer. “I see the film as showing a new romanticism,” Merlant, who plays Nora, said in an interview, pointing to the way characters pursue a wide range of sexual options and are open to exploring what she called “out of the box” relationships, like the one experienced by Nora. “The love story is virtual, but it’s also the most sincere,” she said.

Tomine, whose graphic novels have drawn widespread acclaim for their subtle depictions of urban disconnection, said he admired the decision to emphasize smartphones and computer screens, which was absent from his stories. He said he had also been pleased by the film’s nonjudgmental approach to the subject, especially given that, “you know, Jacques is an older gentleman.”

Aside from the superficial modifications that had been made to adapt it to Paris, he said, the most noteworthy change in the adaptation had been a shift away from his stories’ gloomier tone. “I feel like the film portrays a lot more intimacy, connection and sex than the books,” he added.

A more “cynical” filmmaker than Audiard would have portrayed technology as “isolating,” Tomine said, noting that “it’s almost a daring artistic choice to have it move toward actual romance and connection.”

“It’s a pretty optimistic film,” he added.