And in "Quartier La Madeleine," Frodo-boy Elijah Wood plays a guy smitten, and then bitten, by a Ukrainian beauty (Olga Kurylenko). At night on a city stairway, he steps into a puddle of blood, looks up and sees the sultry vampiress. Vincenzo Natali, a Canadian steeped in sci-fi and fantasy, directed the segment - which is neither scary, nor amusing, nor erotic.
Thematically, several episodes are linked. Loneliness and isolation are big (a man looking for a parking space in "Montmartre"; an American postal worker dining alone in "14eme Arrondissement," another American tourist waiting for the metro in "Tuileries").
There is also much fainting and falling down: a woman collapsing beside a parked car (the aforementioned "Montmartre"); a Muslim girl tripping on a pathway by the Seine ("Quais de Seine"); Juliette Binoche, as a mother whose son has died, crumbling on the cobblestones ("Place des Victoires"), and a Lagos street singer knifed in a plaza, then tended to by a inexperienced EMS worker ("Places des Fetes").
Paris: the city of tricky footing.
It's easy to see the appeal of the project from the perspective of its participants - an international crowd that includes directors Alexander Payne, Richard LaGravenese, Wes Craven, and les freres Coen, and actors Natalie Portman, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Bob Hoskins, Marianne Faithfull, Ben Gazzara and Gena Rowlands (together, as a divorcing couple). Come to Paris for a week and we'll put you up in nice digs, give you a film crew and a little tale to tell. But the tales are exceedingly little, and some of the filmmaking just messy.
