Paris is a great place to go to the movies. With more than 300 screens in 100 different movie theatres, you can see movies from anywhere in the world in their original languages with French subtitles (version originale, VO) or dubbed into French (version française, VF) on any night of the week. Depending on your mood, you can catch the newest Hollywood blockbuster – Pirates des Caraïbes, for example. I’d have expected American movies to have a delayed release in France, but Pirates actually comes out in Paris two full days before the U.S. release – grâce au fait that French theatres switch their movie schedules every Wednesday rather than Friday.

If you’re in the mood for something a little different, there are a few cinemas that show classic movies – like Orsen Welles’ “Touch of Evil” currently playing at the Filmothèque du Quartier Latin, or the Rocky Horror Picture show, which plays every Friday and Saturday near St. Michel. At the Cinémathèque Française members can check out and watch any film from the institute’s film vault in private viewing rooms. There are films from Nepal, China, Latin America, the U.K., Germany, Sweden and South Africa (among many others) playing at theatres all over the city. In Paris, you don’t have to trek down to the Grand Cinemas or art house theatres to find foreign, independent and documentary films. The six-screen chain theatre Gaumont Opéra just two blocks up the street from my apartment is currently playing Jesus Camp, a 2006 indie documentary from the U.S. about an Evangelical Christian summer camp in North Dakota.

Because people don’t really rent movies in France, the movie-watching culture is more of a cinema culture. There are a few pay-by-the-hour rental stores sprinkled throughout Paris, but for the most part, seeing a movie is a going out event. Because of the rare and inefficient rental options, movies play in theatres for much longer to give more people a chance to see them. Woody Allen’s 2005 film “Match Point” is still playing in two theatres in the city. Going to the movies in France is more like going to an actual theatre – the films are scheduled to begin 20 minutes after the advertised movie time to give moviegoers a chance to skip the commercials and previews to sit and have an espresso or sandwich in the movie theatres’ sit-down cafés.

While full-price movie tickets are always a bit steep, it’s easy to get around the prices. Everyone under 26 gets the discounted student ticket, and people with Navigo or Imagin’R métro passes often get discounts as well. Anyone can buy a movie pass, which gets you into as many movies as you have time to watch for a flat monthly rate – usually around 18 euro. The movie passes work for different groups of theatres, like Gaumont and Pathé or UGC, and as long as you make it to at least two movies a month (or upwards of four, like me), they are a fantastic deal. There are constant promotions and two-for-one tickets and during one weekend in March the French association of theatres sponsored the Printemps du Cinéma (Springtime of Cinema), where every showing was a flat 3,50 euro.

Not only is it easy and inexpensive to see movies in Paris, but the cinema culture is very single-friendly. There are always couples and groups, of course, but every screening is filled with a significant number of individuals. When I caught an afternoon matinee of “Marie Antoinette” last fall, the audience consisted of me, one couple and five single old ladies. At a showing of “The Wind that Shakes the Barley” I was surrounded by teary individual middle-aged men. When R and I saw the new Ninja Turtles movie it was us and a whole bunch of single university-aged guys. At a showing of Jesus Camp a few weeks ago I sat two seats down from a single French girl and we spent the whole movie making shocked faces at each other and left the theatre side-by-side shaking our heads in deep disturbance.

The only downside of seeing movies here is that while the biggest blockbusters open simultaneously across the world – Pirates of the Caribbean, Spiderman 3, Casino Royale – there are some movies that you just have to wait for. The movie Zodiac opened in France this past Wednesday – and I’ve been waiting for it since its March 2nd release in the U.S. The movie 28 Weeks Later opened a week ago in the U.S., but won’t make it to France until September 19th. I’ll be back in Seattle in September, but by that point I’ll probably have to wait four more months for the dvd release.

At the movies in Paris the singles bond together, the selection of films is amazing, the prices are reasonable and the French movie popcorn is delicious – but the absolute best thing about French cinema is the French audiences. There is nothing more amusing than seeing an American movie in a room full of Parisians. The audiences are so interactive, and love both American movies and laughing at Americans. When R and I saw Borat, we were almost more entertained by the audience than the movie itself. During the scene at the rodeo everyone was laughing so loudly that we could barely hear the dialogue. Jesus Camp was also an interesting experience, though the reactions were more of the “Tsk tsk America” variety than of amusement.

It’s also funny to watch how the French react to the American culture shown in films that they just can’t relate to. Last night a group of us went to see the hip-hop movie “Stomp the Yard” (oddly re-titled “Steppin’” for French audiences), and it was definitely a cultural experience to watch a movie about black fraternity step teams in a theatre full of Parisians. There was confused laughter through the entire fraternity pledge montage, but the scene that got the loudest laughs was a 10-second clip of a curvy girl walking away from the camera. None of us (a group of two Americans, two Canadians and an Australian) could figure out what the laughter was for. Our best guess was that because behinds just generally aren’t that curvy in France, the Parisians couldn’t understand why her hips would swivel that much as she sashayed across the screen.



• A few days ago I watched an American tourist pose for a picture that featured him licking the giant stone vagina of this statue in the jardin des Tuileries. The next day I walked by and found that the poor old girl had not only been molested, but graffitteed as well.

I love coming home at night to the smell of burned out candles. It’s a smell I’ve always loved – it used to remind me of birthdays, but now it reminds me of my apartment in Paris. The candle smell comes from my neighbors on the first floor (reminder, in France, the first floor is the first floor above ground level) who are a male pair of interior decorators who do quite a bit of entertaining. Every time they have a dinner or party or festivity of any kind, we enter and exit the building by candlelight.



Tonight I got home after the candles had been blown out, and the only reminders of the evening were the still-smoking white candles lining the courtyard and first floor staircase. I was coming home from a movie, trying to make the most of the Printemps du Cinéma promotion that ended today. For whatever reason, the Fédération Nationale des Cinémas Français organizes this three-day period each spring (possibly beginning just last year), during which all movies at all theatres all over France cost only 3.50 per person. Determined to maximize my benefit, I saw a movie all three nights.

Tonight it was Les Témoins, a movie about a group of people in Paris in 1984 who are affected by the “new virus,” or AIDS. It’s been receiving great reviews in the French press, and it really was a good movie. Even better than the movie, was the fact that I realized that I really have no trouble understanding French. For whatever reason, comprehension has always come naturally to me – I’m nowhere near the same level with my writing and speaking, but I feel like I understand fluently. Sciences Po lectures are no problem, and I often find myself translating or repeating for other exchange students. Realizing that I was following the complicated story of how the disease was passed and dealt with by this group of people (not to mention, the complicated ways in which everybody was involved with one another) was just the confirmation I needed.

At one point the girl next to me leaned over to ask “Wait, what excited her?” And I found myself quickly explaining that these two people are married with a baby but maintain an open relationship, which until now, only the wife had taken advantage of. The scene dealt with the husband asking about her sex life and how she’d feel about hearing that he’d gotten some of his own. Turns out, it excited her. The response of my neighbor? “Wow, I did not get that at all.”

Even when I was here on a month-long exchange in high school, I was always introduced by my host family as “Our little American – who will understand everything you say.” It’s frustrating though, being able to understand everything that’s going on around me and feel so limited in expressing myself. I get along fine in day-to-day life, but put me in a discussion about politics and I can nod along without ever being able to express my views as eloquently as I’d like to be able to. I constantly feel like I have to justify myself when speaking to French students – I’m smarter in English, I swear.

In a way, it’s fitting that I am a nanny to an almost three-year old boy learning two languages. I feel like we’re in the same boat, trying to figure out how to express ourselves in the right way that we’ll be understood. We both confuse French and English words sometimes, and both get frustrated when we can’t get our points across. Though Georges tends to start laughing when I say “What? What? I have no idea what you are saying to me Georges,” while I get more flustered and less able to communicate clearly.

Other times though, I communicate too well in French. Today leaving a brutal breakdancing class, I was walking out with another girl, both of us complaining in French about how sore we’d be tomorrow. (If you want an idea of just how sore my wrists and shoulders are going to be tomorrow, check out the following video – we were working on air flares).


After a full hour of supporting our full body weights on our hands, we were walking to the metro together moaning things like, Alors, mes poignets! and Je ne pourrai pas lever les bras demain! (Ah, my wrists! And, I won’t be able to lift my arms tomorrow!) when she apparently caught a glimpse of the label on my REI rain coat and switched to English – “Oh, you’re from America?” I confirmed, and we laughed at ourselves for a minute before continuing to bemoan our worn out bodies. Just before parting ways at the metro, I asked what part of the U.S. she comes from.

As happens in strange countries a good deal more than you’d expect it to, the answer was “Oh, Seattle.” It turns out she’s actually from Vashon Island, a ten-minute ferry ride from my hometown of Tacoma and is in Paris working on her Master (more like general grad school in France). How funny is the world that a Tacoma girl can go to a hip-hop class in the 12ème arrondissement of Paris and learn after three sessions of toprock and six-steps that she’s practicing her freezes next to girl from Vashon? This is why I love this city.