Paul & Paulette Take a Bath – Belfast Film Festival 2024 Review
Paul & Paulette Take a Bath carries with it the threat of insufferability on just about every level: in the title, in dual opening voice-overs, in the premise of an enigmatic French woman (Marie Benati) and an adrift American photographer (Jérémie Galiana) falling for each other against a backdrop of macabre Parisian tourism. I mean, their names are Paul and Paulette, for goodness sake. Have your teeth starting grinding yet?
But if you stick with Jethro Massey’s debut feature beyond that first burst of irritation, then it does unfurl to become something a lot more interesting than the twee nightmare that first presents itself.
Paul and Paulette bond at the spot in Paris where Marie Antoinette was beheaded. After then travelling together to the cell where she was kept to await her end, Paulette asks Paul’s help in cutting off her long hair, in attempt to recreate what would have happened to the doomed queen (Paul comments she would have probably had it all shaved off, but wheels back when he sees Paulette horrified by the idea). They return to the place of decapitation, and thus begins a movie-length attempt to empathise with both the victims and the perpetrators of some of history’s most notorious crimes.
Along the way, an unusual relationship blossoms. Despite Paul’s obvious infatuation, and a definite mutual chemistry, Paulette is determined to keep him at a romantic arm’s length… for a while, anyway.
And the movie is just as enraptured by Paulette as he is. Very much a manic pixie dream girl with a Gallic twist, she is charismatic as all hell, and free as a bird. Paul is given a job (sourcing apartments for rich American businessmen), but Paulette’s sole occupation appears to be being a libertine. Happily, Marie Benati has more than enough presence as an actor to pull off that rather thin characterisation, and does a lot of the movie’s heavy lifting.
To be fair to writer-director Massey, his film does eventually prove interested in what’s going on under the surface of her bon vivant persona. Throughout, Paulette is open about sleeping with both women and men, but a trip home to her parents with Paul shows she isn’t quite as comfortable with her sexuality as she first appeared. The trip also unveils her complicated family history, and what started her down this macabre path in the first place. Though Massey never quite gives us enough to make either Paul or Paulette seems like fully three-dimensional people, that willingness to at least peek under the hood does provide the movie some much-needed grounding.
As the duo’s obsession with darkness escalates, culminating in a breakdown in the apartment of a Bataclan murderer, Paul & Paulette Take a Bath dives into the questions inherent in the sites of historical atrocities that surround us everywhere. Foremost among them: is it healthier to just walk right by them the way most of us do, or – like our heroes – look the evil straight in the face, however distressing it may be?
Whilst Paul & Paulette Take a Bath’s quirky trappings will not be for everyone, the patient will be rewarded with a film that has a lot more on its mind than initially meets the eye.
★★★
