Les Olympiades, Paris 13e

  As the title suggests, Les Olympiades, Paris 13e is a cultural barometer. To represent contemporary France director Jacques Audiard focuses on a little-known arrondisement known for its spectacular modern architecture — hence the opening sweep — and its young, ascendant middle class population that includes a high concentration of Chinese. Here is melting pot France, for better or worse. Nary an Eiffel, beret or baguette shot here. 

In accord with this fresh take on Paris, both central relationships begin with mistaken identity. Emilie is surprised to find that the Camille responding to her roommate ad is a man. Nora is driven out of her confidence — and law studies — by the spreading lie that she’s video porn star Amber Sweet. 

All three central figures work through different conceptions of their selves, moving through their own mistaken identities. Camille leaves his teaching career, then his doctoral studies, to sustain his real estate career. (On the margin, his obese, stuttering sister aspires to an implausible career as standup comedian.) Nora leaves an affair and real estate career with an uncle for the same double duty with Camille. Ultimately she abandons both for an affair with the woman who plays Amber Sweet, i.e., the persona Nora had been mistakenly assigned. Emilie enjoys a free flat but drifts through jobs and affairs before settling back into her opening relationship.

The film’s elegant black-and-white composition is briefly interrupted by Amber Sweet’s colour video. That is, the more realistic palette is given to the unreal supercharge of eroticism. In all three relationships a genuine emotional connection is impeded by the sexual liberty of the times. Camille and Emilie, Camille and his teaching replacement, Camille and Nora, all slip into a sexual relationship that fails to connect them. The sex precludes mutual understanding.

Hence the double happy ending, which is dependent upon the traditional subordination of sex. The Camille-Emilie relationship starts to work when they are living separately but have reconnected and freely discuss each other’s lives (and sex lives). Nora and “Amber” start by Nora buying the video porn star’s time to chat online. It advances to unpaid personal facetime conversation, where “Amber” joins Nora in the real-name world. This relationship culminates in the traditional Paris park personal meeting. So the film that originally feels libertine concludes in (relatively) conventional romances.

The film is as reactionary in its politics as in its sexual morality. The dominant black and white makes the Camille-Emilie and Camille-Nora sex scenes seem rebelliously frank. But the black-and-white mix does not hold up. Emilie is not white but Asian. Her ultimate union with Camille unites two outsiders, not a mix with the mainstream. So too the other couple’s lesbian union. The happy ending reasserts the conventional racial border. For all the architectural advance of this particular area France here remains a black vs white order.