Dhe Olympiades are an ensemble of eight residential towers surrounding a shopping arcade in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris. Each of the towers is named after an Olympic city: Athens, Cortina, Sapporo. . . The construction project, which had begun in the 1960s in the spirit of Le Corbusier, was stopped by a presidential decree in 1974. The city planners’ hopes of attracting the aspiring middle class to the eastern part of Paris by building condominiums were not fulfilled. Instead, mainly Asian families, including many boat people from Vietnam, settled in the towers and adjacent blocks of flats. Around the turn of the millennium, tens of thousands of French people of Asian descent lived in the south-eastern districts of Paris.
Jacques Audiard’s film, which originally has the same name as the district in which it is set, is not only the story of four people, but also an exploration of their world. Here you can see elevators, terraces and pedestrian zones, but the cars that are otherwise part of the inventory of French cinema are missing. When Camille and Nora, who run a real estate agency together, need to view an apartment, they take the metro. Part of the film’s epic irony is that the two of them don’t sell their customers flats in the Olympic Towers, but rather expensive apartments in the west of Paris. But the story always returns to the place where it started, in Émilie’s high-rise apartment.
The film begins with Émilie (Lucie Zhang) sitting naked on her couch singing a Chinese song using her karaoke app. Camille (Makita Samba) lies next to her, and as the couple moves from singing about love to consummating it, the camera pans to the illuminated windows of the towers at night and into the morning light of the next day. Then we learn how the happiness of the two began – and how quickly it ends. Émilie met Camille because she was looking for a subtenant for the apartment where she lives after her grandmother moved to a nursing home. But Camille doesn’t want a permanent partner, he tears himself away from Emilie’s arms: “You’re in love, I’m not.” And she replies: “You’ll miss me.”
“Les Olympiades” is based on several graphic novels by the American comic artist Adrian Tomine. Tomine’s stories are set in New York, mostly among the descendants of Asian immigrants. In them, Jacques Audiard has found a new variation on the motif of the search for home, which he has pursued in several of his films, most recently in “Dheepan” and “A Prophet”. Except that Émilie and Camille, whose ancestors are from Taiwan and West Africa, are actually not looking for a home. You already have it. You are looking for a life. Émilie studied, but has no job, she works in a call center. Camille is a French teacher at a nearby lycée. “We are underpaid, mocked, monitored and silenced,” he says once about his everyday school life. But that’s already in the next chapter of the film, in the story of Nora.
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