Paris belongs to us (1960)

Paris Belongs to Us takes place at Paris. Main characters include Anne Goupil, a young literature student, falls in with her brother Pierre’s friends. One of those is Philip Kaufman. At a party, they discuss the recent suicide of their bohemian musician friend Juan. Different theories about the death get tossed around, and Kaufman reacts violently. Only a day or so later Anne runs into Kaufman, who offers his own take: Juan was murdered as part of the plot of an ongoing worldwide conspiracy. The next to go, he states with certain conviction, will be Gerard, a theater director in this small but significant circle of friends struggling to put together a performance of Shakespeare’s Pericles. The common link between Gerard and Juan, beside their friendship, is Terry, Gerard’s current girlfriend and perhaps Juan’s previous.

Gerard has his eye on Anne and recruits her for a part she is unsuited to play in Pericles. As sexual tension builds between the two, Anne does some investigative work to track down the last recorded tape Juan made and which Gerard wishes he could use for his play. This leads Anne along many paths far enough afield of the main concerns as to elicit justified frustration—if the first half of Paris stays on a steady, if often languid, course in coaxing the viewer with evocative clues and colorful incidents, the second half vanishes in a fog of dead ends and underwhelming revelations. Ironically, in contrast to the conventional arc of the conspiratorial thriller, as Anne questions more of Juan’s friends and embroils herself in a possible underground political network, the allure of Kaufman’s conspiracy erodes. When Gerard asks Anne to give her opinion on Pericles, she states that it’s a disjointed work that makes sense on some other level of meaning. (Paris Belongs to Us, 2006)

The theme concepts of Paris Belongs to Us include youthful rebellion, social criticism and human relationships. In this movie, most of the scene is long shot or extreme long shot. Besides, none of the scene is shot at extreme close-up. Technique zooming out is also discovered in the movie. In editing, jump cut, dissolve, fade in & fade out is used.