Paul and Paulette Take a Bath

Boy meets Girl. Boy finds his spiritually depressed office drone existence newly upended, as Girl suffuses his life with the spirit of madcap adventure. Boy comes to learn that Girl’s tilt-a-whirl existence comes from a source more painful than initially suspected, thus learning the valuable lesson that perhaps, MPDG’s (need it really be spelt out in full?) harbour private pain and messy, decidedly un-magical humanity too. It takes little time to realise that director Jethro Massey’s feature debut is one such tale, but it is startling to see these tropes laid out in so unselfconscious a fashion, as if this particular set of mismatched characters have never before come together onscreen to learn this particular set of lessons.

In this case, one half of our pair of star-crossed quirksters is Paul (Jeremie Galiana), an American in Paris conducting an indifferent affair with his boss (Laurence Vaissiere) and seeking connection to alleviate his blues. The other is Paulette (Marie Benati), a young woman adrift who copes with her ongoing breakup by fixating on the emblems of violent French history (say, the scene of Marie Antoinette’s beheading), seemingly in the morbidly glamorous hope of becoming one herself. Indeed, it could be easy for an actor to lose sight of a coherent human being in a storm of quirks that also takes in wigs, Elvis affectations and the sudden devouring of raw lemons, but Benati does yeoman’s work in suffusing a type with real pathos. The actor’s work is grounded enough to take Paulette’s personhood as a given, not an instructional tool elusively withheld until the time for its lesson to be dispensed. Had the film leaned on her as its protagonist, a more rewarding story may have been told. 

It may be no accident that the more “ordinary” half of this pair is so comparatively vapid, but Galiana’s performance offers little hint as to why Paulette would ever give him the time of day, let alone the mistress/boss who grants him endless lenience at work and voracious interest at home. Paul’s blankness even suffuses the visual sensibility of the film surrounding him, with Paris’s landmarks washed in a patina of tourism board flatness. Viewers may walk away as aware of the seductive power of Paris as ever, but they’ll also be scratching their heads as to how, for the last hour and change, it came to look just like any old place.

Come Paul and Paulette Take a Bath’s conclusion, a curious tonal pivot is attempted. Paul is realising in real time that he’s been riding shotgun in someone else’s story. Perhaps the true shortcoming of this stilted tale is that one still feels this story is meant for him, and him alone.

Thomas Messner

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