Six in Paris (Standard Edition)

1965 saw a young Barbet Schroeder make a challenge to six of his New Wave colleagues to create a vignette with a 16mm film camera and stock about any suburb of the city of Paris. The result was Six in Paris.

Saint-Germain-de-Pres - Written by Jean Douchet & Georges Keller, Directed by Jean Douchet.
American student Katherine falls for a local young man and finds out he’s fooled her. She doesn’t make the same mistake twice. Douchet plays with the common trope of girl meets boy, they have a fling, and they have a fight in this short. Our would-be lovers suffer that same curse of many an aboard relationship in the differences of culture and etiquette, neither really attempting to try to understand each other. The heroine then discovers something important that changes her mind, but now the question is if she’s missed her chance.

 American stage actress Barbara Wilken plays Katherine, sporting a fair delivery of French and giving a decent portrayal of a young lady learning a valuable life lesson. She’s accompanied by little-known actors Jean-Pierre Andreani and Jean-Francois Chappy as the two men out to seduce her. I found this to be the most straightforward of the six tales as Douchet takes his audience from Point A to Point B to Point C in a fairly quick fashion,not depriving said audience of anything crucial. The two main characters may not get much depth in 16 minutes, but they still feel quite real like anyone you’d meet on the street and are relatable in many ways. The Saint Germain de Pres neighborhood is quite beautiful and scenic. A good starting story. 4/5

Gare du Nord - Written & Directed by Jean Rouch.
A young couple have an argument after the wife declares married life has taken the mystery and passion out of their relationship. Soon, a mystery man enters the picture and opens a change. Rouch goes the more ambiguous and philosophical route in his short. Staleness and falling into mundane routines are the breaking point for the young wife (played by Nadine Ballot) of this tale, she fears her youth, vibrancy, and beauty are wasting away as she and her crush from school are becoming just like everyone else in the ever-increasing hectic pace of life. The husband, played very well by producer Barbet Schroeder, while feeling a little similar to his wife, sees a bright future for them, but can’t get her to understand. 

The Mystery Man (played by Gilles Queant) appears to emphasize the hard but necessary truth of life everyone faces at one point I found this to be the most unusual and abstract short of the lot as Rouch plays with the detest of the “rat race” the world allowed itself to endure, but also not forgetting that sometimes the hard road leads to better things. The young leads again feel real, and audiences able to identify and empathize with them as they face similar struggles and fears. Gare du Nord was a typical small quaint suburb like you would find in any city, but sadly was losing that appeal to an influx of massive building booms. Still a beautiful area. 3.5/5

Rue Saint-Denis - Written & Directed by Jean-Daniel Pollet.
Timid Leon hires a prostitute and they end up having a unique evening. Pollet breaks the mold and offers a light-hearted fare with his entry. Set entirely in a single-room apartment, viewers follow the interesting evening that unfolds as a bland young man works up the courage to get intimate with the prostitute he engaged for the evening. I found this episode quite amusing and while some of the moments between the two leads get awkward, the worldly woman takes it all in stride. I’m pretty sure many young men at the local cinema could empathize with the male lead, wanting to successfully go higher up in manhood, but at the same time retaining a boyish awkwardness and uneasiness. Both Micheline Dax and Claude Melki do excellent jobs in their respective parts, making the characters feel alive. Pollet reminds viewers that opposites really do attract as while the young man clearly has trouble getting going, the gallant woman keeps her patience and slowly comes to find him charming in his unique way. Nothing frivolous or filler, just a simple story told in a very amusing way. 4/5

Place de l’Etoile - Written & Directed by Eric Rohmer.
Jean-Marc, a men’s attire salesman, panics and runs after believing he’s killed a man with his umbrella. Eric Rohmer delivers a good suspense vignette tale here with sparse dialogue. He takes an average, everyday guy and suddenly thrusts him out of the ordinary when in an act of self-defense, thinks the brutish attacker has died and flees without seeking help. I found this the most engaging and well-paced of the shorts, Rohmer keeping his audience glued to the action as the bewildered leading man patiently wonders whether a long prison term or the guillotine awaits his actions. 

Jean-Michel Rouziere playing Jean-Marc does an excellent job of portraying the French equivalent of an Average Joe type, a poor guy viciously jolted into a frightening nightmare situation he wishes never happened. Rohmer plays with Absurdity in the piece, playing out a tense situation with morbid playfulness. The Place de l’Etoile setting is the most well known thus far in the film as it’s near the famous Arc de Triumph, which narrator Rohmer states only tourists and military veterans visit regularly. 4.5/5

Montparnasse-Levallois - Written & Directed by Jean-Luc Godard.
Monica mixes up her “Dear John” and “I Love You” letters and attempts explanations to the intended recipients. Jean-Luc Godard took the basic plot of one previous film, Le Meprise (Contempt), and a fictional news story mentioned in another, Une Femme est Une Femme (A Woman is a Woman), and reversed the roles in a unique way where it’s now two men receiving letters from an amorous woman. I’ve never really been a fan of Jean-Luc Godard, usually finding his work pretentious and arrogant, but I did find myself pleasantly surprised by his contribution to Six in Paris. 

That he decided to let people know the game of playing between two lovers is a two-way street, and that men can be just as much victims as women was a pretty daring case to make in the 60’s. Godard looks objectively at the situation, painting neither the woman or the two men as good or bad, just the way it all naturally is. Joanna Shimkus, a Canadian actress and wife to icon Sydney Poitier, and delivering French dialogue like a native speaker, does an interesting job in the role of Monica. We the audience never truly get to know her motivation or if she really loves either of the men in her life, keeping her a mystery. The same can be said of her costars Serge Davri and Phillipe Hiquilly, the latter Godard just picked up off the street.  Like with St. Germain de Pres, Godard takes the audience from beginning to end with no filler, getting right to the point. How the whole affair is resolved is up for viewer interpretation. While not much of the area the story is set is featured, it was clearly a working-class neighborhood that was still striking to look at. 4/5

La Muette - Written & Directed by Claude Chabrol.
A Bourgeois couple is always arguing, and their young son has had enough. His earplug solution will have issues though. Chabrol and his Muse Stephane Audran star in the finale as a couple whose constant griping and spats have finally pushed their preteen son to shut their voices out entirely. Even in his early career, Chabrol showed off his knack and passion for taking shots and poking fun at the Bourgeois class, and with this short, he’s at his most absurdist and acerbic. He also breaks the film’s theme mold as La Muette translated to English means “The Mute”, though since it’s about an upper-class family, audiences can easily surmise the short takes place in one of Paris’s affluent spots. Whether he’s showing his character of the father openly carousing with the maid or Audran’s mother contradicting herself on topics, Chabrol knew where to hit the upper elite the hardest and most scathing, showing no mercy. Gilles Chusseau as the son comes off more as a wandering figure, acting as the audience’s guide to what he sees every day. This isn’t a negative, but it doesn’t do much to keep viewers supporting him. This for me is the strongest story of the 6 in that Chabrol might be focusing on the ordinary for the elite, but also takes the time to tear them down for their hypocrisies and falsehoods. That he isn’t focusing on a specific neighborhood or area like his colleagues makes the short different and refreshing. 5/5

Vital Disc Stats: The Blu-Ray 
Six in Paris makes its Blu-ray debut thanks to Icarus Films and OCN Distribution. Pressed on a Region A BD-50 disc, the disc is housed in a clear Viva Elite case. If you order from Vinegar Syndrome you can pick up an exclusive slipcover. The disc loads to a standard main menu with traditional navigation options.

Icarus Films' new 2K restoration of the film looks very good, especially considering it was shot on 16mm film stock and later expanded on to meet the 35mm requirement of theaters. Colors like blue, red, green, and yellow really pop, and are vibrant and crisp to look at. Others like brown, black, and any monochromatic color benefit from the detail imaging the restoration offers so those colors don’t look fuzzy or bunched together. Buildings and faces offer a nice amount of detail as well, and while everything can’t be made out to the last cell, is still a fine-looking image. Grain is highly present in the film, but evens out well for the most part, and isn’t intrusive or distracting at all, keeping with the guerilla-style filmmaking and the feel of the 16mm camera footage the creators wanted. In the last two or three minutes of the final vignette, the footage appears to slow down to almost a freeze, but luckily I discovered this to be an issue in the master elements as I checked the disc on both my Blu-Ray players and Xbox One, and found the same results each time.

The sole audio option for Six in Paris is a French DTS HD-MA 2.0 Mono track. The audio for the most part is clear and crisp, little to no hiss and no pops at all. Much of the outdoor scenes and some of the undressed interior scenes appear to have been shot with natural sound, and thus some background noises drown out the audio on occasion, making sections of dialogue inaudible and hard to understand. The subtitle translation suffers a little from the noise as certain sections of dialogue are left untranslated thanks to it, though a few occasions of characters asking each other to repeat sentences are there. Chabrol’s segment saw him having the audio equipment turned completely off to emphasize the son’s wearing the earplugs, so this is a creative choice and not an audio issue. The sole subtitle option is an English translation of the French audio.

• Barbet Schroeder Interview/Barbet Schroeder & Patrick Bauchau Interview (SD 7 min.) Barbet Schroeder first talks about what inspired him to create Six in Paris, and then he and fellow producer Patrick Bauchau discuss how the New Wave movement will push cinema forward. Recorded for Swiss TV in 1965. In French with English subtitles. Worth a watch for tips in independent filmmaking, and to learn a little more about the French New Wave.
• Jean Rouch Interview (SD 5 min.)The director behind Gare du Nord talks about how he became a part of the Six in Paris crew and the methods and techniques he used while filming. Recorded for Swiss TV in 1965. In French with English subtitles. A solid interview with a director about his craft.
• Eric Rohmer Interview (SD 6 min.) Rohmer discusses his interest in the use of walking in films and some bits on the New Wave and its manifesto. Recorded for Swiss TV in 1965. In French with English subtitles. Rohmer is a unique figure in French cinema and worthy of a watch.

Six in Paris is a mixed bag when it comes to a recommendation. While there’s more to like about the film than to dislike, I must be honest and say the film might not be for everybody. Visually the film is beautiful to look at and offers a solid inner view of the City of Lights from the point of view of a group of locals showcasing the city not just as a location, but of the varied people and lives that make up its inhabitants.

Icarus Films with OCN Distribution did a fine job with the Blu-ray’s transfer and quality. The vignettes aren’t overly complex and in fact quite easy to follow, but the techniques and styles of the directors might not appeal to all viewers. Out of the six shorts that make up the film, I found only segment two, Gare du Nord by Jean Rouch, to be a little too experimental and hard to grasp. The other five are well worth the time to watch, especially the ones by Pollet and Rohmer, both offering good doses of humor to the film. All in all, I would say this film will appeal mainly to the arthouse crowd but do suggest any viewer to watch the film, even if only one single viewing. One or two of these shorts may end up appealing to the general film buff. Worth a Look to the curious.