Metacritic Film

Dans Paris

Starring Romain Duris, Louis Garrel, Joana Preiss, Guy Marchand, Marie-France Pisier, and Alice Butaud

MPAA RATING: Not Rated

IFC Films
Drama
93 minutes | Color
France
Released In Theaters August 8, 2007

A depressed and suicidal man returns home after the break-up of his marriage to live with his divorced father and amorous younger brother. While his care-free brother and doting father try in vain to cheer him up, a visit from his mother seems to be the only thing that brings him joy. Left in the house to talk to his brother's girlfriends and brood, he finally realizes that while things haven't gone according to plan, his family is always there for him and there is always something to live for. (IFC Center)

WRITTEN BY
Christophe Honoré

DIRECTED BY
Christophe Honoré

Overall Metascore

This is a weighted, normalized average of all individual scores given by critics, on a scale of 0 (worst) to 100 (best).

60 / 100

Critic Reviews

88 Premiere Aaron Hillis
Where Dans Paris truly pops, besides its spot-on leads or the slick curation of its fashions and locales, are in its mood-mixing musical moments.
83 The Onion (A.V. Club) Noel Murray
Besides the restless style, Dans Paris is remarkable for being more about familial bonds than French cinema tends to be.
80 The New York Times Manohla Dargis
Picks up where the early François Truffaut and his comrades-in-cinema left off -- with a playful, liberatory style, and a song (actually, a few) in his heart and on his actors’ lips.
75 Chicago Tribune Sid Smith
Dans Paris is a cohesive, albeit sometimes creepy, fabric of disparate modes and colors.
75 Boston Globe Ty Burr
Dans Paris provides a brooding, poetic echo - an after-dinner mint to a lasting meal.
70 Salon.com Andrew O'Hehir
There's a vivid comedy to this family's emotional state of siege, an easy confidence to Honoré's camerawork, and plenty of beautiful bodies.
70 The Hollywood Reporter Frank Scheck
Dans Paris makes the city seem like the ideal place to be clinically depressed.
70 Variety Jay Weissberg
Inside Paris is that rarity, a genuinely honest, unpretentious and delightful, small film, alternately sober and effervescent, steering clear of either heavy-going philosophizing or dreaded whimsy.
70 Village Voice Julia Wallace
Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris is both a floppy, joyful tribute to the French New Wave and an inspired retelling of "Franny and Zooey."
50 TV Guide Ken Fox
This is a film for hardcore film fans and Francophiles. Everyone else may find little to sustain them beyond the pastiche and shots of Paris.
50 Washington Post Ann Hornaday
Dans Paris will delight aficionados familiar with its myriad references, and there's no denying the appeal of Duris and Garrel. But once the source of the boys' primal wound is revealed, the whole enterprise comes to feel as mechanical as the Bon Marche window display that serves as one of the film's plot points.
50 New York Post V.A. Musetto
Make a movie about depressed people, and what do you get? A depressing movie.
50 Chicago Reader Jonathan Rosenbaum
Christophe Honoré collaborated with Anne-Sophie Birot on the script of her excellent "Girls Can't Swim," but left to his own devices, he seems like a relatively dull cousin of Arnaud Desplechin (My Sex Life . . . or How I Got Into an Argument).
40 LA Weekly Ella Taylor
Cliché, or experiment with cliché? Really, it’s not worth sticking around to find out, since the action mostly involves the monotonous Romain Duris standing around in his underpants or sitting on the toilet banging on about why love has fled.
40 Los Angeles Times Carina Chocano
Moody, mannered and supremely irritating, Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris plays like a pastiche of French cinema clichés through the ages.

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