‘Les Olympiades‘ is the name of one of the most non-Parisian districts of Paris, a kind of dormitory district with tall buildings and standardized architecture built in the 1970s. It is also the French name for Jacques Audiard’s latest (2021) film distributed under the English title ‘Paris, 13th District’. Like the atypical Parisian neighborhood that tourists have no reason to visit, ‘Les Olympiades‘ is a rather atypical film for the career of the French director who made some very good films combining the thriller genre with social criticism, bringing to the screen a France less picturesque, but authentic. Celine Sciamma, the screenwriter and director of the excellent ‘Portrait de la jeune fille en feu’, also collaborated in writing the screenplay, which ensures that the feminist points of view are well represented. After trying his forces over the ocean with a western and he is quite far from the templates (‘The Sisters Brothers’), Jacques Audiard continues his cinematic explorations with this film, the story of three young people in Paris today, of their lives filled with stress and problems, of the relationships between them that in the rush of life sometimes lead to sex but almost never to love.
Camille is a (talented) high school teacher who at one point takes a break from teaching to find time for his PhD and works (without talent) on a real estate agency. A misunderstanding leads him to be a co-tenant and share the apartment with Emilie, a girl who lives an intense and messy life. At the agency he meets Nora, who, going through a trauma that the heroine of Radu Jude’s ‘Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn‘ would recignize, had dropped out of law school and returned (with talent and without passion) to her job as a real estate agent. The three young people have sex, fall in love, are or are not couples, are looking for each other, separate, get back together. The relationship that starts with sex is the one that eventually turns out to be more stable than the one that starts on the emotional path. However, better not to draw conclusions, because Audiard doesn’t try to suggest any morals either.
The plot unfolds smoothly, as Jacques Audiard knows how to tell stories on screen. The cinematography is excellent. Audiard and Paul Guilhomme decided to use (except for one scene) black and white, and the combination with the background of a depersonalized Paris, which could be any other big city in the world, is spectacular. It is in this un-Parisian atmosphere that the script manages to bring into question some of the critical issues of today’s urban French society – the infernal pace of life, job insecurity, the multicultural environment and relations between different ethnic communities, the housing crisis – along with other emotional elements valid everywhere – the connections between young people who do not have time to live, the relationship between sex and love, the pressure of the internet social networks. The social-sentimental combination is well balanced. Lucie Zhang, Makita Samba and Noemie Merlant play excellent lead roles. The soundtrack is also interesting and well adapted. ‘Les Olympiades’ is a film anchored in life, filmed in an unusual Paris, which will definitely attract the interest of many of its viewers.