Art and Architecture

A Remarkably True Seven Minutes

Motivation in August of 2002, Tom Tykwer’s powerful 7 tick film Faubourg Saint-Denis, the highlight of last year's anthology video Paris Je T’aime, started out life as Correct, an acclaimed ten minute work that premiered in Germany in 2004. Starring a out of this world Natalie Portman as a young American actress in Paris and Melchior Beslon as her unsighted boyfriend who confuses reality with a part she is playing, Tykwer’s pic is a moving chapter in one of the most distinctive directorial careers of the decade.

Faubourg Saint-Denis is so exciting that apparently it was the film used to finance the dawn stages on the production of Paris Je T’aime with The Coen Brothers signing on in a little while after seeing it and the film's other 19 directors straightway following in their steps.
For those who haven’t seen it, Paris Je T’aime is thoroughly an achievement…and it reaches its peak though in Tykwer’s component, a short that manages to somehow take his most transcendent work in films like Run Lola Run, and The Princess and The Warrior and clutch them into a remarkably concise seven minute divide.

What makes Faubourg Saint-Denis so sui generis is the thing that makes all of Tykwer’s work so valued, namely the rare ability to capture the rawest of Good Samaritan emotions in the most cinematic terms possible. Alluring visual cues from such American stylists as Brian De Palma and John Carpenter and combining them with some of the thematic obsessions of both Eric Rohmer’s relationship pictures and Kieslowski’s studies of karma and fate, Tykwer’s growing canon is a unconditionally...

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