Oui, c'est ca, Paris

Some days are just like this. Dim. Gray. Gray. Gray. Damp. Ugly. Everyone is tired. Listless. No one seems grumpy, just blah. The city looks like a moldy black-and-white postcard. There's dirty water in street gutters. To avoid the blowing rain at the bus stop I decide to take the nearest métro instead. I duck into the smelly, grimy Chatelet station, which on a good day would depress Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Gray. Blah. Fatigue. Spleen de Paris.

February, quoi.

So I indulged in a little afternoon cinematherapy at La Pagode and went to see Paris for the second time this week. I'll certainly go a third time. A fourth. Not that it's an uplifting movie, and there is no award-winning plot. But for me, a movie to watch again and again: it captures the heart and soul of Paris. In some ways in the spirit of Balzac's La Comédie humaine, it's a kaleidoscope of images and lives, both hopeful and wistful, criss-crossing in Paris. At the end of the film, as the Satie theme music plays, Romain Duris gazes longingly out the window of the taxi as it winds through the city. "Oui, c'est ça, Paris," he says. "No one is ever happy. Everyone complains. They don't know how lucky they are, to walk, to eat, to be, to be alive -- just like that. In Paris."