One reviewer of the indie film Paul and Paulette Take a Bath, written and directed by Jethro Massey, called it “twisted,” but it seems to me that it is not the film itself but the main characters – and, by extension, the societies they live in – that are twisted.
Certainly, this unusual romantic comedy has a dark side. A short summary: Paul (played by Jérémie Galiana), a young American photographer in Paris, is fascinated when he sees an attractive young woman repeatedly kneeling down on the pavement then bowing her head on the Place de la Concorde. He snaps some photos and eventually strikes up a conversation with her. It turns out that Paulette (Marie Benati) is re-enacting the execution of Marie Antoinette in the place where it happened. He connects with her by offering some extra information about the queen’s walk to the guillotine, thereby demonstrating that they have similar interests. They have a laugh when they learn each other’s first names.
A friendship develops based on their mutual fascination with macabre moments in history, which they like to relive in the places where they happened. As they pursue their strange hobby and become close friends, the inevitable occurs: one falls in love with the other.
The macabre moments in the film are indeed disturbing. To name just a couple of the sites they visit while wandering around Paris: the spot where the bodies of murdered Algerian demonstrators were thrown into the Seine by the Paris police (headed by Nazi collaborator Maurice Papon) in 1961 and the ruins of a human zoo in Paris’s Bois de Vincennes, where entire families from France’s colonies were imported to the city in the 1920s and exhibited to the public in fenced-in replicas of their villages at home.
This detail shocked me more than some of the other atrocities alluded to in the film; in all my years in Paris, I had never heard of this one and didn’t know that its vestiges were still standing and can even be visited.
One of the elements that makes this film so intriguing is the disconnect between the charm of these quirky young people and their creepy pastimes. Where do these strange obsessions come from, in the film as in real life, we wonder? The film doesn’t attempt to explain this odd couple’s preoccupation with the horrors of history. The only hint of its possible origin is the revelation that Paulette’s rugby-player father did time for murder when she was a child. They are more than the sum of their weird interests, however, and come across as rounded characters, even people we would like to know, complete with all their eccentricities.
Both the lead and supporting actors are marvelous in their roles. Jérémie Galiana has Jesse Eisenberg’s goofy brand of charm, and Marie Benati positively glows with wacky magnetism.
I managed to see this film, which was released in 2024 but never distributed in France, at a recent one-off screening in Paris. Impressively well made for a director’s first feature (the British-French Massey has made short subjects, music videos and documentaries), it won prizes at various film festivals in 2024: the Critics’ Week Audience Award and Cinema & Arts Award at the Venice Film Festival, Best First Feature at the Dinard British & Irish Film Festival, and Best Actress for Marie Benati at the Monte Carlo Comedy Film Festival.
Given all that and the fact that most of the action takes place in Paris, it seems strange that the producers, who continue their search, have been unable to find a distributor in France. Is that because of the close look Paul and Paulette takes at some of the shameful moments from the country’s history? It wouldn’t be surprising.
One thing is for sure: Paul and Paulette Take a Bath deserves a wider audience. See it if you can.
Click here to watch the trailer.
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