“An interesting and fresh entry into a well-worn genre, and a surprisingly sober look at France’s history with violence.”

“There is an abyss in every one of us, but we don’t dare to look. When you reach into it, it’s good to have someone hold your hand.”

There are more than enough boy-meets-girl stories to call it a proper genre. And given the romantic implications, Paris, the most romantic city of all if we go by movie fantasies, has often been the setting for such films. The second installment of Richard Linklater’s Before… series, one of the best-known examples of the genre, was set there, although to draw equivalencies to British-French director Jethro Massey’s debut feature Paul & Paulette Take a Bath it is a much smaller feature that comes to mind, Antoinette Boulat’s 2021 title Ma nuit. Incidentally that film also played in Venice, a romantic city in its own right, but for a more weighty comparison we should note that Boulat’s film was also a seemingly simple story in which a girl meets a boy, yet romance isn’t the endgame. At the risk of spoiling it is safe to say that the two protagonists of Paul & Paulette Take a Bath do not end up together, although they will have a fling on their way to self-discovery. It is the self-discovery part that Massey aims at though, just like Boulat, and that makes his film a tad deeper than most works in the genre. The quote at the start of this review underlines this, just as it is a way to describe the macabre fascination the characters have with death and humanity’s darkest corners. Though faltering in pace at certain moments, Paul & Paulette is an interesting and fresh entry into a well-worn genre, and a surprisingly sober look at France’s history with violence.

Paul (Jérémie Galiana) is an American living in Paris who has just found a job at a company that rents out fancy apartments to wealthy businessmen. In his spare time he likes to wander the streets and photograph Parisian life, and this is how he meets Paulette (Marie Benati): on her knees in the middle of the street. Fascinated by this he chats her up, and she enlists him in her hobby: the reenactment of famous crimes and murders at the site where they occurred, in this particular case the beheading of Marie Antoinette. Paul, somewhat of a history buff going by his knowledge of random historical trivia, is intrigued by this rather morbid activity, but mostly by Paulette herself. In the ensuing weeks they meet again, recreating anything from a fin de siècle murder to the shooting of the last Communards. Paul’s intentions are romantic, but for Paulette this is a way to work through a broken relationship and a dark family history, each of which will come further to the surface the deeper the two are drawn into their macabre game. When Paul’s love is ultimately not reciprocated after a few days of hot sex and the title’s bath, he sets up one last act to win over the object of his desire, only to break himself to pieces.

Paul & Paulette Take a Bath certainly does nothing to diminish the image of Paris as the City of Love, as far from reality as that cinema-created image might be. Both Paul and Paulette live in the kind of apartments that should be out of their pay range, and their murder road trip takes them to some of Paris’ prettiest places. The film also flirts with the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope through Paulette, her quirky demeanor combined with Benati’s looks (a cross between a young Jennifer Connelly and Zooey Deschanel, the ultimate MPDG) not earning much emotional depth until well into the film’s 105-minute runtime. It’s only after Paulette refuses to talk about her parents that the film starts sowing the seeds for a complex character who becomes an equal to her male counterpart, if she doesn’t outright supersede him. Paul’s complexity remains constricted by his infatuation, an affair with his boss (Laurence Vaissière), reverse-stereotyped but also in typical French fashion portrayed as non-problematic despite the power imbalance, not really adding anything to his character or the film other than being fodder for banter between the two leads. That Benati oozes charisma no doubt contributes to this image, but in the end it’s her story that we become invested in, while Paul’s emotional moments in the film’s final scene pass with little more than a whimper.

Paul’s illicit affair is an example of the film at times being preoccupied with scenes that add little to the drama. This causes the film to sag from time to time, only to pick up when comedic but otherwise superfluous events are exchanged for moments of actual character development. Galiana suffers more from this than Benati, as his Paul barely develops until the film’s final act. Massey’s writing is definitely not bad, and he has a knack for crisp dialogue even if at times it doesn’t sound the way normal human beings would speak (think Aaron Sorkin, but thankfully a lite version), but structurally Paul & Paulette Take a Bath could be tighter. His direction is unobtrusive, exactly the kind of hand a film like this asks for, and every time Benati is on-screen it lights up, while Galiana is perfect for the role of the square American who is in a Paris-set romantic comedy, only to find out more about his own grief. Paul & Paulette Take a Bath can’t fully shake the tropes of the genre even if it manages to break out of its mold to some degree, but it’s a charming story that features what would be a star-making turn if the film weren’t this small.