Adam Driver plays the role of a bus-driver, Paterson, who spends most of his free time writing poetry in the city of Paterson, New Jersey. Paterson is a small city out of which literary giants such as Allen Ginsberg and William Carlos Williams emerged, and it is this magic sentiment derived from this knowledge of all the well-known and talented people that come from Paterson that seems to inhabit its streets. He lives with his partner Laura, played by Golshifteh Frahani, who stays home and fills it with her whimsical and joyous aura. As Paterson incessantly yearns for poetry to express the vibrant and wondrous sensibility with which he sees the most banal elements of daily life, we follow his life for a week. Displaying no lofty goals for himself, he is nevertheless confronted by the question of how original his individuality is, the great loneliness of not being understood and the frustrations of daily life.

            Jarmusch’s long and symmetrical shots convey Paterson’s humdrum life in a comedic but sometimes devastating way. One of the most salient themes throughout the film is the loneliness of the artist who cannot express what matters to him and why it matters, be it to his partner, who he has not read a single of his poems to. The opening high-angle shot shows the couple sleeping in bed on a Monday morning. Already, one notices the Melville copy on Paterson’s bed-side table and the iPad on Laura’s. While Paterson spends his free time reading poetry and writing, we notice his tacit frustration at his partner’s erratically-chosen passions. It is in these silent moments that Driver excels at conveying the repressed frustration of the spouse, of wanting to support but interiorly despairing at Laura’s care-free joy, while he is intimately possessed by his craft. She decides she wants to be a country singer, believing she might have the right aura for it and purchases a several hundred dollar guitar with Paterson’s credit card. Driver just winces and then smiles supportively. It is this anguish of the artist of being anchored to their grand passion, confronted with a world of individuals who merrily pass from one pleasure to the other. Before his partner’s joy, Driver cannot help but smile, albeit with a shadow over his face.

            In what is portrayed as a small town, the greatness of the famous who have grown up there invites us into the beauty of the worlds that live within each and every one of us. On one night Driver stops in front of a laundromat where a man is practicing slam poetry. As a bus driver, he spends his days in silence but also gets glimpses of casual, amusing and sometimes intelligent conversation. As the film progresses, Jarmusch increasingly shapes the metaphor of the town as the banal wonder of the interiority of human lives, which Paterson seems to be alone in trying to capture.

            It is this futile but existential value of artistic creation which we tediously assist Paterson in. Near the end of the film, Laura’s dog, which Paterson has come to despise, tears the entirety of his poems to shreds. This moment shows Paterson’s solitude to be ambivalent, as Laura had spent days telling him to photocopy his poems. Through Laura’s character, we find a message of great humanity in Paterson’s humdrum life. That despite his cerebral anomie, he lives with a spouse which understands, perhaps not the poetry, but the importance of his poetry to him, more than he himself. And it is this ambivalence which inevitably seems to spark the little moments of joy in his daily life. That intellectual convergence does not suffice to love or be loved, but rather that what is needed is emotional understanding. This idea of the seemingly futile quality of artistic creation is further compounded by what he decides to do once his notebook is gone. He goes back to see the waterfall which had been his muse, and we realize with a certain awe, that with or without his poetry, the beauty he had been trying to capture perdures and keeps existing in the world regardless. In one scene, still grieving from his lost notebook, a travelling shot follows his eyes as they browse through his books. It is a relatively short stack of books, but one cannot help imagining Paterson comparing his slim notebook to several feet of books. These published works stand as a large wall casting a shadow on all the individuality around it.

            This brings us to another great theme of the film, and where the mentioned existentially-challenged individuals might begin finding their solace. Paterson does not show any signs of wanting to be published or of becoming a renowned poet. He is nevertheless confronted to the idea of his lack of originality as a human being. It would be hard to count the amount of twins that happen to walk past him or to ride on his bus during the film. Despite his unsatisfied serenity in life, moments arise when his timid desire of uniqueness is gently challenged by the world around him. Notably, he meets a young girl who is waiting for her mother outside of the bus hangar. The girl is writing poetry which Paterson finds very impressive. He memorizes it and recites it to his partner at dinner. Laura responds by saying that it sounds like it could be his. At an other moment, Laura tells him that his poetry is just as good as William Carlos William’s. His tranquil ecstasy at the little joys in life are what make him this peaceful individual. He nonetheless suffers at not being heard, in a world where the only way to do so seems to have one’s picture proudly pinned on the wall of a local bar.

            Frequent shots of Paterson from outside the bus and still, symmetrical shots enclose him in the spaces he lives in, notably his bus. In the eyes of the world, as for many of us, his identity and humanity are assimilated to his occupation. In one of the final scenes, after the tearing of the notebook, he is asked whether he is a poet by a Japanese tourist. He responds by saying that he is a bus driver. At first, this might seem like he is refusing to admit that he is a poet, but in reality he is saying something much deeper. That he is a living human being and that being a bus driver does not inhibit him from living life in the most sensorily exquisite way. The whole film is a grand demonstration of the impressions, love, feelings and observations of the city that this bus driver takes in. There is the idea that an occupation is a description of what one physically does for 8 hours a day, but in no way constitutes identity. William Carlos Williams, for example, wrote poetry while being a doctor. Dubuffet, the meteorologist of the Eiffel Tower who was an artist as well, is also mentioned in the film. In a world where fame is everything, it seems that Jarmusch is pushing us to remind ourselves of what it is that draws us to books and art. Rather than fame or famous people, it is life itself that we can’t keep ourselves from exploring. And life is in us all, no matter our occupation. In the words of Toni Morrison: “You are not the work you do; you are the person you are.” In an era of internships and career burn-outs, it is certainly a very timely message.

            What we are left with is this deeply resounding truth of the imperfection of life. How we dream of great things, but often have to accept their limitations. Paterson has to take the dog out for walks every night. This is something that he hates doing but that his partner asks him to do. There are various comical scenes of the dog dragging him in various directions and of it being very stubborn. The dog shows life at its most ordinary and unglamorous. In the words of Maupassant: “Life is never as good or as bad as we think.” It just is. Paterson narrates the closing scenes by remembering a song his grandfather used to sing him, but the only thing he remembers about the song is the line “Would you rather be a fish?” We are constantly frustrated about what could be. This question endlessly occupies our minds. By focusing on ambitious hypotheticals we often forget the rest of the song. In Paterson’s life, the rest of the song is this joyful woman who bakes cupcakes for the neighborhood market and cooks strange dishes with mountains of affection. A woman who does not understand him and yet makes him happy in very unexpected ways. It is in this ambivalence, that the film does a wonderful job at depicting life the way it is, without any answers. Except for the fact that we constantly alter between the wondrous and the humdrum. And that regardless of outward appearances or worldly positions, our ultimate comfort is always the beauty and pleasure that each and every one of us holds within ourselves.

Crédit Image : ©France Inter

The story revolves around three characters, which entangle themselves in a love triangle as complex as their repressed truths, a loneliness which they all bear but cannot share or communicate. We are first presented to Camille (Makita Samba), a charismatic teacher who reveals to us, in one of the opening scenes, that he “compensates his professional frustrations through intense sexual activity.” He comes to share an apartment with Émilie (Lucie Zhang), a young first-generation Chinese French woman, who feels bound to occupy the home of her Alzheimer-ridden grandmother who is slowly passing away in a hospital room. She has graduated from one of France’s most prestigious universities, but works in a call center. Finally, Nora (Noémie Merlant) has just moved from Bordeaux to resume her studies at the Sorbonne at the age of 32, with a troubled sexual history.

Individuals are shown estranged from their romantic partners and friends, but also families. In the multicultural 13^th district, known as Paris’ Chinatown, the modern reality of dispersed families with parents returning in China, a sister living in London and a young Émilie living in Paris, reveals all its sentimentality and tragic despair when Émilie’s grandmother passes away, alone in her hospital bed. Émilie had made a deal with her room mate : she goes and visits her grandmother once a week in her place, for a lower monthly rent. Émilie reasons that because of her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s, the old woman wouldn’t know the difference. Émilie is fustigated by her sister and mother through the phone for not caring enough, but for her, the passing of her grandmother is a liberation from an apartment she realizes she doesn’t want to live in. Never once does she physically meet her sister and parents in the film. Estranged from the lovers of one-night stands, Audiard’s modern man is estranged from family as well.

The choice of filming in black and white is the occasion for Audiard to demonstrate his masterful control over light and darkness as characters find themselves enveloped and isolated within sheaths of white, composed by the blurred contours of the cityscape at noon, or drowning in the darkness which fills the dancefloor of a techno party between each thump of a monotonous beat. The languid techno beat characterizing the music in many of the party scenes starkly contrasts with the melodious but sizzling energy of Rone’s electronic tracks. This in turn, seems to insinuate a hint of confluent tomorrows between Man and its technology, if played out right. The characters, however, are further entrapped in light, by the squares within which they are shown to be living in, seen sitting on their sofas within their windows which, after a pan out, reveals them to be one of a million, in the most populated district of Paris. It is in these pan outs of individuals living within their dimly-lit windows, that the luminous contrasts are most poignant in their depiction of the immensity and overwhelming nature of the nocturnal urban environments we casually live in.

The only moment when colors are shown, curiously, is when we see the video of a cam girl, right before we are introduced to Nora. At her first Sorbonne university party, Nora puts on a blond wig which leads a group of her male classmates to mistake her for their favorite cam girl and porn star, AmberSweet. Consequently bullied as entire amphitheaters light up with videos of whom many believe to be her, engaging in violent and submissive sexual positions, she drops out. Our introduction to porn in the film is the only moment in color so it is evocative of its central thematic role in the story. Underneath the plane of this world depicted as a dehumanized and atomized space, lies a fundamentally modern aspect of the human experience, which is rarely honestly discussed : the prevalence of porn as a part of sexual experience. Audiard excels at showing the incisive absurdity of a technology which can pull the most arousing or extreme sexual scenes out of thin air, in a first year’s palm, as throngs of fellow female and male classmates peer over it. Porn and digital sexuality come to symbolize a sort of suppressed truth, a rupture between what we do in our private lives and what we tell others. The digital commodification of individuals is made powerfully clear when, as Nora leaves the party having been told by a man of his desire of ejaculating on her face, she opens her phone to a link of one of the porn videos in which she is believed to be performing. A reaction of searing pain and shock ensue, as the trends of society which seem to bubble up through her phone, presumably leave her wondering in what way she resembles the girl being brutally taken from behind on her small screen. The question of sexism in pornography is quickly brushed aside, just as it is in real life when one unquestioningly exits a browser.

Audiard, however, does not conclude with this over-simplification of digital commodification. Digital sexuality in the film becomes an expression of true human emotions, as well as human touch and our attempts to try to get closer to one another. Through skype and video calls, Camille and Émilie flirt and glow from the heights of their separate apartments. Through a dating app, Émilie leaves her restaurant shift for half an hour of blissful sex with a complete stranger, and upon her return dances a theatrical and splendid valse through her restaurant, resuming her shift to the acclamation of customers. When she tells Camille about her use of dating apps, he responds to this confession with an admonition. And this reaction is perhaps what best represents how modern audiences feel about modern and digital love and sexuality and why they are so puzzling to us. It presents us with forms and codes of love never experienced in millennia of human history, leaving us confused and unsure about swiping, the synthetic hum of excessively tired computer fans or the strange metallic warmth of over-heated smartphones. Audiard seems to suggest that regardless of bewilderment before synthetic novelties, at heart it is the age-old combination of human emotion and hormones, and ultimately love and compassion which travel across these technologies.

Perhaps the grand manifestation of this, is Nora’s own quest for truth. Initially, traumatized by her assimilation to the cam girl, she curiously decides to contact the woman she is being compared to, gradually befriending her by chatting online. Perhaps searching to understand what a woman should do when sexually shamed and demeaned or perhaps simply to find a friend in her lonely world, she effectively breaks the barriers between the physical and digital world, which in the end are one and the same. Audiard ultimately leaves us with the sentiment, that despite the new technological appearances of the modern world, they are nevertheless the forms and pathways through which we express our unfiltered humanity.

Crédit image : ©Neue Visionen Filmverleih

What exactly are the symbolic, if not geopolitical repercussions of the affair. That the unforeseen and seemingly erratic nature of the deal provoked the rage of a country with resentment from what it considered a clear slighting from the world stage is clear. 

A few questions can be raised : what exactly did France gain from the ostentatious and assertive reaction of the current administration ? How important has this become in the American executive‘s considerations ? 

What is certain is that the White House is making unprecedented efforts in seeming apologetic to an extent rarely seen in recent American history. Biden’s visit to Macron at the French Embassy to the Vatican proved highly symbolic in this regard, Biden effusively commenting on a much regretted American negligence, apologizing all but in name. Vice-President Harris’ week in Paris, accompanied by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, is a significant manifestation of consideration for an important ally. This, however, is from an American perspective.

Having sent strong signals with the American president at the Vatican, the Élysée persists in sending out a cautious message, awaiting beyond all else, more than implicit apologies, concrete suggestions for a common future and a sign of “good will” from its American partner. It is striking to point out the initial derision with which American media reacted to the French fit of rage. It seemed that for several weeks, no one understood why one would get angry for a couple nuclear submarines. More than a painful financial loss, AUKUS represents the devastating humiliation of having been warned 30 minutes before the press, of a major geopolitical realignment. The White House has effectively taken a more concerned approach to the considerations of its big ego ally.

During the Trump Era, Macron’s France was among the prominent nations to support the pillars of multilateralism, a narrative which Biden has made a point of not only wanting to fit into, but of taking the lead in. While AUKUS is most evocative of the United States’ shifting gaze towards China, France remains the principle military force of continental Europe, assuring its dissuasive capacities. Not to mention that France is the western country with one of the largest EEZs in the Indo-Pacific region, as well as the largest EEZ in the world overall.  That France is a medium-sized power with significant military and defense capacities is the sort of puzzling equation which might have left it out of AUKUS’ considerations to begin with. If the American show of reconciliation demonstrates one thing, it is that France is a non-negligeable partner in a shifting geopolitical environment and that the White House wants to show that it realizes this.

The Vice-President’s week is dense with conferences on topics as diverse and fundamental as collaboration in space strategy and digital platforms, this last point being of chief concern for France in the wake of the controversies surrounding Facebook, over the revelations by whistleblower Haugen that the media platform’s algorithms tend to foment polarization and discord. A topic of increasing concern as French parliamentarians welcomed Haugen to the Assemblée Nationale on Wednesday last week. Friday, an international conference on Libya with, among others, the Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi and Russian Foreign Affairs Minister Sergey Lavrov, concluded the geopolitical chapter of the visit.

Among more symbolic visits, the Vice-President began her week by visiting American and French researchers studying Covid-19 at the Institut Pasteur, as well as paying homage to the American cemetery in Suresnes, where over 1,500 fallen American soldiers from both world wars are buried. Finally, on Thursday the 11th, she is expected to appear alongside Macron at the Arc de Triomphe to commemorate the 1918 Armistice. Enough visits to revive the image of the oldest allies in the “free world”, at least for now.

In the end, what provoked the French reaction is none other than the fear of not being considered as a relevant geopolitical power. France not recalling its ambassador from the United Kingdom was a perhaps infantile way of showing its age-old rival that despite its inclusion in AUKUS, fundamentally, the pact is the US’s show of strategic strength and reorientation towards Asia and not Boris Johnson’s « Global Britain’s ». The French Foreign Affairs Minister, Jean-Yves le Driand further emphasized this by derisively calling the UK the « fifth wheel on the coach ». Similarly, it is ironic to notice that what instigated the cancellation of the French-Australian nuclear deal was partly America’s will to assuage Australia’s own geopolitical frustrations of not having been contacted during the evacuations from Kabul in the context of the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. Faced with this big world soup of frustrated egos, the transatlantic alliance, left for “brain-dead” by some, desperately needs to understand and more effectively implement an otherwise perfectly rational and much-needed cohesion. Perhaps the Vice-President’s visit this week is a manner of showing this, but whether it will be fruitful for transatlantic collaboration remains to be seen.