Paris, je t'aime (lit. 'Paris, I Love You') is a 2006 anthology film starring an ensemble cast of actors of various nationalities. The two-hour film consists of eighteen short films set in different arrondissements (districts). The 22 directors include Gurinder Chadha, Sylvain Chomet, Joel and Ethan Coen, Isabel Coixet, Gérard Depardieu, Wes Craven, Alfonso Cuarón, Nobuhiro Suwa, Alexander Payne, Tom Tykwer, Walter Salles, Yolande Moreau and Gus Van Sant. It was the first film in the Cities of Love franchise.

Production

Julio Medem was attached to the project for a long time. He was supposed to direct one of the segments starring Javier Bardem and Maria Valverde, but this finally fell through because of scheduling conflicts with the filming of Caótica Ana (2007). Paris, je t'aime is the first feature film to be fully scanned in 6K and mastered in 4K in Europe (as opposed to the normal 2K). Encoding the image took about 24 hours per reel (at Laboratoires Éclair). Both Claudie Ossard and Emmanuel Benbihy served as producers on the project, while Gilles Caussade acted as an executive producer. As the film is a collection of shorter segments, there were also producers attached to each episode of the project.

Arrondissements

Initially, 20 short films representing the 20 arrondissements of Paris were planned, but two of them (the 15th arrondissement, directed by Christoffer Boe, and the 11th arrondissement, by Raphaël Nadjari) were not included in the final film because they could not be properly integrated into it. Each arrondissement is followed by a few images of Paris; these transition sequences were written by Emmanuel Benbihy and directed by Benbihy with Frédéric Auburtin. Including Benbihy, there were 22 directors involved in the finished film.

Release

The film premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival on 18 May, opening the Un Certain Regard selection. It had its Canadian premiere at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival on 10 September and its US premiere in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on 9 April 2007. Paris, je t'aime was released theatrically in France on 21 June 2006 by La Fabrique de Films, in Switzerland on 13 September 2006 by Ascot Elite Entertainment Group and in Germany on 25 January 2007 by Senator Film. First Look Pictures acquired the North American rights in September 2006, and the film opened in New York City on 4 May 2007, before expanding to other American cities including Los Angeles on 18 May.

Reception

Paris, je t'aime received generally positive reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 86% based on 112 reviews, with an average rating of 7.1/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Paris Je T'aime is uneven, but there are more than enough delightful moments in this omnibus tribute to the City of Light to tip the scale in its favor." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 66 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

Influence

Following the success of Paris, je t'aime, a similarly structured film, New York, I Love You, focusing on life in that city, premiered at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival and received a limited theatrical release in 2009. The third and fourth entries in the series, Tbilisi, I Love You and Rio, I Love You, were released in 2014. Berlin, I Love You followed in 2019.