The Albuquerque Film Club just finished a twice-daily four-day run of the French-Belgian comedy, Lost in Paris (Paris pied nus). In the AFC's five years' of presenting nearly eighty films, seldom have we had as enthusiastic response to any film of any era or any nation. Literally hundred of patrons thanked the Guild Cinema management or me (the host) and said that Lost in Paris was wonderful, and many added was the best comedy they had seen in ages. Why? Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon, the husband & wife team at the center of Lost in Paris are very likely the most inventive, joyful and brilliant comedians in movies today. They studied physical comedy with famed Jacques Lecoq, but they are also skilled handling dialogue. Both look like ordinary people, as most of us do, but a bit stranger; still they make a believable and attractive romantic duo. Fiona plays a spinster librarian, brought from arctic Canada to Paris by a distress letter from her elderly aunt (played by French film icon Emmanuelle Riva (aged 88). There Fiona encounters Dom Abel, a bohemian scrounging the leftovers of Parisian life, not because he is society's cast- off, but because he is happy to be footloose and a bit of a rascal. I've now seen Lost in Paris four times. I laughed heartily at each showing, but by the third and fourth I was able to recognize how brilliantly constructed the script was, how well placed were the 'big moments', and how craftily Sandrine Deegan edited the film. Many comedians undermine themselves by trying to write, direct and star. In Lost in Paris, Dom and Fiona excel at all three skills. The ABQ Film Club Has Already booked their 2011 equally hilarious film, The Fairy (La Fee) for November 2017. Don't miss either movie.
Review of Lost in Paris
