Paris gets a love story it deserves

The set decorators of Hollywood have long relied on Eiffel Tower knickknacks and cheap reproductions of Doisneau’s kissing-lovers photograph as shortcuts to signal romance. Such symbols hint to the audience that a character might live in Cleveland, but she’d rather be in Paris. And Paris itself -- that instant backdrop for romance, that earthly paradise for lovers -- has provided the happy Hollywood ending for a long string of American movies, to both charming and cheesy effect.

Filmmakers have exploited the real and imagined romantic ideal of the city in everything from the Hollywood back-lot Paris of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1939 “Ninotchka” and Vincente Minnelli’s 1951 “An American in Paris” to Billy Wilder’s enchanting 1950s classics “Love in the Afternoon” and “Sabrina.” More recently, they’ve used it like a cheap gimmick in movies such as Billy Crystal’s 1995 “Forget Paris”; Woody Allen’s 2002 “Hollywood Ending,” in which a has-been New York director (played by Allen himself) is panned for a film he made while hysterically blind -- only to be hailed a genius in Paris; Nancy Meyers’ 2003 romantic comedy, “Something’s Gotta Give”; and the recent final episode of HBO’s hit “Sex and the City,” in which Carrie runs off to the most romantic city in the world, only to realize there’s no place like home.

But for all the Hollywood films whose Paris endings are a deus ex machina to rescue love stories without enough passion of their own, every once in a while a film comes along that demonstrates that there really is no place like Paris for an American in love. Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunset,” which opened Friday, is a sequel to his 1994 cult hit “Before Sunrise,” in which Jesse, a young American man (Ethan Hawke), meets Celine, a young French woman (Julie Delpy), on a train and they spend an unforgettable night together in Vienna, vowing to meet again in six months. “Before Sunset” reunites the pair in Paris, nine years later. It’s the rare cross-cultural Parisian love story worthy of its locale, and it shows up the thin cliches that generally pass for Paris, and love, in Hollywood films.

In “Something’s Gotta Give,” for instance, Paris is a conceit used to inject romance into a banal story of middle-aged love in New York. . Diane Keaton plays a bummed-out divorcee playwright who locks herself up in white turtlenecks and her neutral-toned bedroom-office. A Francophile banished to the Hamptons, she speaks French to the staff of the local gourmet takeout, listens to nostalgic French music and has leftover coq au vin (what else?) in the fridge.

When Harry (Jack Nicholson) enters the picture, first as her 31-year-old daughter’s sixtysomething, never-married, philandering date and later as her love interest, she falls hard for the old cad, telling him in a romantic moment that she’s always wanted to write a play that ends in Paris -- which, presumably, is a very romantic thing for an American woman to say. They decide that they will go to her favorite Parisian brasserie for their birthdays, should they still be together. Naturally, the old dog breaks her heart, coming to his senses six months later when he learns she has gone to Paris without him.

He hops the next plane and steps out into the Paris night to find her, the Eiffel Tower glowing behind him at the end of the fictional street -- like a fake moon in a school play. But she is soon also joined by her hunky young doctor lover (Keanu Reeves), and the threesome shares a many-coursed meal (how French!), while our heroine, it seems, has taken up smoking. Isn’t it romantic?

Being in love in Paris can make a couple feel more in love, but it can also expose the flaws in a less than solid match. The old cad might not have had the sense to whisk her there, but he’s the one with whom she’d rather be in the City of Light. So she says her goodbyes to the doctor and chases Harry down in a taxi. She finds him walking one of Paris’ scenic bridges, alone, in the “snow.” They profess their true love, and kiss, and live happily ever after.

Carrie the Parisian

Virtually the same corny scene was played out in the much-anticipated final episode of HBO’s “Sex and the City.” Carrie finally gives up hope that her beloved Big will come around and gives in to the proposal made by her worldly Russian artist suitor (played by Mikhail Baryshnikov), who romances her into an indefinite stay in a plush suite at the Plaza Athenee.

At first, she is nothing but giddy, all-American smiles, saying “Bonjour!” to everyone in sight and trying out her Berlitz crash-course French. “Is it your first visit to Paris?” the chilly daughter of her lover asks her on her first day there. “Well, not if you include movies,” she says, in one of the episode’s smartest lines.

But the show soon becomes an American-in-Paris series of Eiffel Tower shots, luxury store shopping sequences and scenes involving cafes, smoking (the city seems to bring out uncontrollable nicotine urges in people) and sidewalks treacherous with doggie-doo. “It’s harder than I thought,” Carrie moans to her friend Miranda from a pay phone (what happened to Carrie’s cell?), after rinsing off her skinny-heeled white pump in a fountain at St. Sulpice. “I’m in Paris -- I’ve wanted to come here my whole life.” (And why exactly did a 38-year-old New York columnist not trade in one of her pairs of Manolos for a plane ticket before now?)

After two long weeks in which Carrie loses her gold “Carrie” necklace (self), realizes she doesn’t love her new boyfriend and has an epiphany brought on by finding her “Carrie” necklace (self), she decides to go home. Within seconds, Big appears in the lobby of her Paris hotel. They might have fallen in love in New York, but they close the deal in Paris, where, also on a bridge, Big finally utters the words: “You’re the one.”

Of course, the French have proved that they too can have a rose-colored view of their own city, as demonstrated most recently by Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s “Amelie,” with its happy ending featuring our heroine on the back of her beloved’s motorbike, riding through the streets of Montmartre without a helmet. But American movies usually treat Paris like a finishing school -- that place where an American girl becomes a sophisticated lady and is then granted the chance to become a woman in love.

The heroine in Ismail Merchant and James Ivory’s film version of Diane Johnson’s novel “Le Divorce” learns all about French lingerie and haute cuisine from an aging ladies man before mating with a young Parisian buck and throwing away her ticket back to Santa Barbara. “Sabrina” went to polish her cooking skills at an idealized version of the Cordon Bleu, with its one-windowed kitchen that held a view of (you guessd it) the Eiffel Tower, and grew up in the process into the kind of woman her man could love.

In the 1995 movie “French Kiss,” Kate (Meg Ryan) follows her fiance to Paris, where he has had the nerve to fall for a French girl, and she meets “Frenchman” Luc (Kevin Kline, in a Clouseau accent) along the way. Though lactose intolerant, she is taught to eat cheese and eventually gets the happy ending she was not looking for. (In a silly gag that might have been a nod to the ubiquity of the Eiffel Tower as sole geographic locator in Americans-in-Paris movies, she spends the whole movie looking for it, and, incredibly, does not see it until the end). This brand of American-in-Paris shtick is not lost on the French, who have always gotten a kick out of our postcard vision of the French capital, what their city looks like through an American lens.

Actually capturing charm

But if most of these happy endings read like some desperate attempt to add romance to a tired tale, some American love stories were destined to end up in Paris, even if Paris was not where they began.

Linklater’s “Before Sunset” picks up our lovers in Paris, where Jesse has come on a book tour of the novel he wrote about their one night together. Celine shows up at the reading, and our lovebirds do what couples in Paris have done throughout the ages: They take a stroll, and stop for a coffee and a cigarette in a cafe (she smokes, he joins her), and walk along the Seine, and talk, and sit on a park bench, and almost lose track of time and fall (back?) in love. And end up in her funky apartment with Nina Simone playing and the cat wandering around the house, as if they had been there together forever.

More than any other American-in-Paris film of recent times, “Before Sunset,” with its 80 minutes of real-time conversation, captures the genuine charm of a cross-cultural romance in Paris. Sure, Jesse calls Celine a Frenchie and a Commie once or twice, but mostly they are products of the same world. She has become an environmental activist, which he admires; she tells him she’s happy he’s not “one of those Freedom Fries kind of Americans.” He is an American abroad, but he looks at Paris the way he looks at her -- as if it is something he could learn to live with. When Jesse insists they hop on a boat to ride down the Seine, she’s embarrassed, saying it’s for tourists. But as she watches the city float by on a bright summer day, she says, “This is great; I’ve never done this. I forget how beautiful Paris is.”

And when he walks into her leafy courtyard on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine in the 11th Arrondissement, he says, “This is incredible. This is where you live?” Her old shabby Parisian staircase and homey, cluttered apartment is exactly where your girlfriend might live if she were 32 years old and a dreamy bohemian singer-activist. Notably, it’s not a movie-set version of a Paris apartment with an Eiffel Tower in the window.

Linklater (along with Hawke and Delpy, who co-wrote the script) manages to capture the same real charm that made the first movie resonate with audiences. It felt like something that had happened to you. And in this intimate, affecting, funny, lyrical, hopeful and lifelike film, Paris looks not just like the perfect location to shoot a romance, but the most likely place on earth for a love story with a happy end.