Paris wants to be famous, and a little thing like being undead isn’t going to stop her. That single-mindedness drives Nicky Murphy’s “I Love Paris”, a vampire mockumentary that screened during After Dark Vampire Night at the Toronto After Dark Film Festival. The “I Love Paris” movie is a confident and often hilarious horror-comedy from a filmmaker whose last feature was a straight comedy. It’s also longer than it needs to be.
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What is “I Love Paris” about?
Murphy, who co-wrote the film with star Aminata Thiboult, frames it as a documentary made by Paris’s Australian friend. Murphy plays the friend himself, and he is rarely seen on camera. Paris is a Parisian singer-rapper desperate to break through, and the friend’s camera follows her through the city’s clubs and backrooms as she chases her next big break. Then she meets Lutèce (Leonor Oberson), who bites her. Her afterlife comes with a steep quota of kills, and the camera keeps rolling.
Aminata Thiboult carries the film
The premise invites comparisons to “What We Do in the Shadows”, or the lesser known, “Familiar”, but the film’s real subject is the cost of wanting to be watched. Paris is vain. She’s also impulsive and relentlessly self-focused. Yet she remains magnetic, and that’s Thiboult’s doing. She plays a woman who is exhausting and impossible to look away from, and the film never lets the horror overwhelm the satire or the other way around.
For a first swing at horror-comedy, it’s a remarkable one. Murphy and Thiboult have clearly thought hard about their own vampire rules, and the film treats the supernatural as a career obstacle as much as a curse. The production is lean and handmade. Murphy is credited as both cinematographer and editor, and the handheld, you-are-there texture does a lot of work that a bigger budget might not.
Why only Paris could produce this vampire
Start with the name. Paris is the city and the character at once, and her stage name is lifted from the most recognizable souvenir slogan in the world. She has turned a tourist cliché, often plastered on t-shirts, into a personal brand, which is exactly what a city that has spent centuries selling its own image would produce.
The camera also refuses to showcase the city through the lens of a tourist. This film isn’t for them. It’s for Parisians, and those who see Paris as more than a tourist magnet. Murphy, an Australian who splits his time between Melbourne and Paris, films the city like a local. You see the clubs where celebration and desperation sit side by side.
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Where “I Love Paris” loses its pace
The trouble is stamina. Mockumentaries run on tight comic timing, and “I Love Paris” runs close to two hours. The clearest example comes when Paris sits down in front of the Eiffel Tower and plays the The scene makes its point quickly: she is a performer who believes the whole city is her audience, and the joke is that the camera, like everyone else, has no choice but to watch. Then it keeps going well past the point where the joke has landed. The film holds the shot while the comic energy drains out of it, and what began as a pointed bit of satire turns into a test of patience.
Long in the fang, but worth the bite
It’s a small complaint about a film with this much personality. “I Love Paris” is a sly, stylish genre debut that could just stand to leave the party a little earlier.
“I Love Paris” screened at the 19th edition of the Toronto After Dark Film Festival, held Oct. 14 to 18 at Scotiabank Theatre in Toronto.
