France
and Canada have traditionally enjoyed close ties, but Fiona the librarian might
fix that. She hails from an impossibly snowy English-speaking Canuckian burg,
but she has longed to join her flamboyant Aunt Martha in the City of Lights. She
will get her chance, but her lack of French fluency and spectacular clumsiness
will lead to no end of complications in Dominique Abel & Fiona Gordon’s Lost in Paris (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Aunt
Martha’s letter urgently summons her to Paris to prevent her from getting bustled
off to a nursing home, but by the time she arrives, the former music hall
dancer has already taken to the wind. Through an unlikely but highly cinematic
chain of events (which are in fact quite common in Lost) Fiona also faces the prospect of living rough on the streets
of Paris after losing her luggage and money. However, the embassy’s meal
voucher takes her to a riverfront restaurant, where she starts tangoing with
Dom, the vagrant who found her cash and clothes.
Dom
is instantly smitten, whereas she is understandably resentful when she
discovers the truth. Yet, Dom will constantly follow her like a faithful dog
whenever she needs his dubious help. Naturally, he speaks French, but he is
still the master of miscommunication. At least he has the balance of a mountain
goat when chance forces them to scamper up the Eiffel Tower like Franchot Tone
in Charles Laughton’s Maigret movie.
Abel
& Gordon are regularly and deservedly compared to Jacques Tati, but they
are about as close to unknown as you can be and still get reliable art-house
distribution. They clown with the same grace as the master, but they also have
an idiosyncratic visual sensibility somewhat akin to Aki Kaurismäki. In this
case, their flair for physical comedy is infectious, inspiring the late grand
dame Emmanuelle Riva in one of her final performances (as Aunt Martha)
following her Oscar-nominated turn in Michael Haneke’s radically dissimilar Amour.
