The Eiffel Tower, the Sacré-Coeur, the Seine, the Arc de Triomphe. Tourist hotspots of the city of love that are high on the list of any first-timer's itinerary. But along with the typical picture-postcard images of the endlessly popular French capital, are hidden corners, quiet neighbourhoods and stories from history that aren't shouted about in guidebooks. Film is always a wonderful way to experience a city and how different artists view it, from the comfort of your sofa – and Paris is no different. Countless films have been set there, whether lavish literary adaptations, glitzy musicals or gritty dramas set on the outskirts. Below are a few of our favourites, that each show a completely different face of this most romantic of cities.
An American in Paris (1951)
Vincente Minelli’s tour-de-force, golden age musical is a total work of art, bringing together exquisite, painterly sets, Technicolour cinematography and memorable Gershwin musical numbers, with dance sequences choreographed by the film’s star, Gene Kelly. The storyline is a typical romance that plays out against the backdrop of post-WWII Paris, as war vet and struggling artist Jerry (Kelly) tries to sell his paintings on the streets of Montmartre, and ends up falling in love with a French girl, Lise (Leslie Caron). But the real triumph of the film is the impressionistic ‘dream ballet’ finale sequence that moves between several colourful set pieces inspired by artists such as Toulouse-Lautrec and Renoir. The film depicts a stylised, imagined Paris, as the entire film was shot on MGM's Hollywood backlot, with the exception of some brief stock footage of the city.
Breathless (1960)
Arguably the Parisian film, Godard’s A Bout de Souffle – i.e. “Breathless” – is the poster child of the French New Wave and everything we associate with it: rakish Frenchmen, bobs and Breton stripes, enough cigarettes to kill a small elephant. The film follows wolfish small-time crook Michel, played by nouvelle vague icon Jean-Paul Belmondo, as he and his American girlfriend Patricia (a waifishly naïve Jean Seberg) go on the run from the police after he shoots a cop during a car robbery. Shot in black and white by legendary cinematographer and long-time Godard collaborator Raoul Coutard, the film is Paris via jump-cuts, as lively as it is overwhelmingly chic. There was nothing of its sort when it was first released in 1960.
Amélie (2001)
Amélie might just be the perfect film to get you in the mood for a trip to Paris. Within the film’s perfectly whimsical world, every frame is perfectly curated in saturated tones of red, green and yellow which creates a heightened, fantastical vision of the city - just try not to get disappointed by the real thing once you get there. Directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet (who directed the equally madcap Delicatessen), the story follows imaginative café waitress Amélie (Audrey Tautou), and her interactions with an oddball cast of characters in her neighbourhood of Montmartre. Adventures ensue once she encounters eccentric photo-booth enthusiast Nino (played by Mathieu Kassovitz, director of La Haine), and the film proceeds to unfold with the same sense of satisfaction of watching a meticulously set up game of Mousetrap fall into place. The film’s playfulness and attention to small details is endlessly captivating, from Amélie’s idiosyncratic love of cracking a crème brulée with a spoon, to the richly layered décor of her apartment. Filming locations such as the Café des Deux Moulins where Amélie works, and her local supermarket, are real places in Montmartre that can be visited.
Moulin Rouge (2001)
Another film that depicts a heavily stylised Paris is the overwhelming sensory overload Moulin Rouge. Directed by Baz Luhrmann - also known for The Great Gatsby and Elvis - in his distinctive maximalist style, the film is a carnivalesque fantasy of the glamorous yet seedy world of the cabarets in turn of the century Montmartre. Told in flashback, the story focuses on the doomed romance between writer Christian (Ewan McGregor), and cabaret performer Satine (Nicole Kidman). Never one to be strictly rooted in historical authenticity, Luhrmann opts for an anachronistic jukebox musical with bombastic arrangements of songs by Madonna and Nirvana featuring on the soundtrack - Kylie Minogue even makes a cameo as a fairy.
Cléo from 5-7 (1962)
If the New Wave was dominated by a handful of self-conscious male auteurs – think Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, Chabrol – then Cléo from 5-7 is a refutation that the movement was purely a boy’s club. Agnes Varda’s film is set in real time, following pop star Cléo over two hours on a summer day as she awaits the results of a biopsy which she expects to confirm she has stomach cancer. She spends much of that waiting time wandering anxiously between cafes, her spacious and spare loft flat, and the 14th arrondissement’s Park Montsouris, encountering a variety of Parisian characters and observing a life that she is suddenly acutely aware she might lose.
La Haine (1995)
The word ‘hard-hitting’ is frequently overused as a descriptor of film and TV, but not in the case of Mathieu Kassovitz's masterpiece La Haine, the story of which has sadly remained relevant ever since its release in 1995. Set in the banlieues, or ‘projects’ on the outskirts of Paris, the story concerns police violence towards the young minority community of the neighbourhoood, and follows 24 hours in the life of three friends, Vinz, Hubert and Saïd. Combining cheeky humour, shocking violence and striking black and white cinematography, the film is a vibrant yet sobering reminder of another side of the city that exists, and is undoubtedly one of the greatest Parisian films that everyone should watch at least once.
Before Sunset (2004)
The second instalment in Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy is also its most ambiguous; while Before Sunrise is a hopeful and finely balanced vignette of flirtation and fascination, and Before Midnight is a bruising portrait of a marriage in trouble, Before Sunset combines the optimism and the maturity of both. Nine years after they first met in Vienna in Before Sunrise, Jesse and Céline run into each other in Paris, and take the opportunity to catch up and wander the city together for a day. Initially, it’s just as friends – their dalliance in Vienna was just a youthful frisson, and they are each in a relationship. Jesse even has a son back home in America. But Paris works its charm on him as it does the viewer; it all builds up to that iconic final line delivered by Julie Delpy, as the pair dance in Céline’s apartment and simultaneously realise they’re not going to miss their second chance to be together: “Baby,” she murmurs, “you are gonna miss that plane.”
Marie Antoinette (2006)
Sofia Coppola loves to make a film about fraught girlhood, but she’s never restricted herself to the 20th or 21st centuries. Indeed, Marie Antoinette is in many ways the perfect Coppola heroine: young, beautiful, fabulously wealthy, and also deeply lonely and unfulfilled. In Marie Antoinette Coppola played fast and loose with historical fact – one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot showed Marie Antoinette wearing lavender Converse All-Stars – and leaned heavily into the opulence of pre-Revolutionary France. And while we need to add the obligatory disclaimer that much of the film takes place at Versailles, outside Paris, the sheer volume of gilding and champagne and macarons and ballgowns mean that it’s hard not to include the film here. A detour from the capital is well worth a day trip.
Eden (2014)
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Step into 90s and 00s Paris with Mia Hansen-Løve’s Eden, an underseen film centred on the French Touch style of electronic music that originated in the city and went on to enjoy huge success, becoming globally influential with the likes of Daft Punk emerging from the scene. We follow Paul, an aspiring DJ (based on co-writer and brother of the director, Sven Hansen-Løve) who rapidly rises to the top of, then subsequently becomes disillusioned with the scene, against a thumping soundtrack of classic songs from the era. Specific clubs and parties around Paris are recreated from (admittedly probably hazy) memories of the time, with electrifying results - it has to be one of the best depictions of clubbing seen on film. Although there is a sense of nostalgic cool to these scenes, Eden also shows us the less glamorous side of the life of a DJ, what happens after the party’s over and the lights go up.
Midnight in Paris (2011)
Midnight in Paris might be the film set in Paris which most explicitly shows the city through the eyes of a romanticizing outsider. In this case, that’s Owen Wilson’s earnest American author Gil Pender, who while on holiday longs to experience Paris’s heyday in the 1920s and rub shoulders with the likes of Hemingway, Cocteau and the Fitzgeralds. Plot twist: he does! The film rightfully doesn’t bother to explain exactly how the taxi Gil gets into on the stroke of midnight takes him back in time, but it does nonetheless, and he – and the viewer – are transported into the swirling, febrile interwar metropolis, where he promptly shares an absinthe or two with Gertrude Stein and the Surrealists. Needless to say, the reality Gil is trying to escape is waiting for him back in the present. Charming and smarter than it seems on the surface, Midnight in Paris is both wish fulfilment and a gentle warning to those who wish aloud that they could live in the past.
The Dreamers (2003)
If half the best films set in Paris are from the 1960s, then a good chunk of the more contemporary contenders deliberately look back to the decade. The Dreamers is one of them, packed full as it is of homages to New Wave films. Thirty years after he directed Brando and Maria Schneider in the hyper-controversial Last Tango In Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci returned to make an equally sexually transgressive drama set in the city, this time following a love triangle between two Parisian twins and an American student against the backdrop of the May 1968 riots. The Dreamers has it all, including full-frontal nudity and incest, violent rioting and an attempted murder-suicide (though thankfully no butter to be seen anywhere), but it still retains a certain naïvety and good faith, particularly with regards to youthful experimentation and political optimism. The result is an odd duck of a film, which is at least thought-provoking and very romantic, if not quite as politically radical as it aspires to be.
Ratatouille (2007)
You probably know the premise of this one: Rémy is a masterful cook, while plongeur Alfredo Linguini struggles to make a basic dish despite dreaming of being a successful chef. But Rémy also happens to be a rat, and so he and Linguini team up to collaborate in secret, with the rodent sitting under Linguini’s toque and directing him like a puppet to cook up a storm. So far, so Pixar, except that Ratatouille – one wonders if the pun came before the premise – is one of the studio’s best and most enduring films, set against a sort of chocolate-box, tongue-in-cheek animated vision of Paris that charms and delights.
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris (2022)
Mrs Harris Goes to Paris takes that classic 1950s staple, the comedy of manners, and transplants it into Parisian high society. In 1957, a cleaning lady from London decides to visit Paris and buy a dress from Dior after receiving a war widow’s pension, immersing herself in haute couture and throwing an ethical grenade among the chic designers at the maison, as they grapple with whether or not they have to make a dress for a working-class English woman. The film – which is the third adaptation of a 1958 novel originally and hilariously called Mrs ’Arris Goes To Paris – raises the question of who exactly fashion is for, and by extension, who Paris is for.
Hugo (2011)
Martin Scorsese’s least Scorsese film, along with Kundun and the interminable The Age of Innocence, Hugo was an understated children’s film which smuggled in a potted history of early French cinema (that’s where the film tips its hand and offers proof that it’s a Scorsese feature). Set in the Paris of 1931, the eponymous Hugo is the orphaned son of a clockmaker who ends up working for the cantankerous owner of a toy shop, a man named Georges Méliès, and his goddaughter Isabelle; film buffs will already know how Méliès turns out to be significant in Hugo’s second act. Most of the action takes in and around the area of Gare Montparnasse in winter, and Hugo’s is a world of garret flats and chilly 14th-arrondissement backstreets, a little like if Oliver Twist was set in interwar France.
Les Misérables (2012)
A huge success on its release more than 10 (!) years ago, Les Misérables remains an epic spectacle of early 1800s France, managing to be at once rousing, tragic, violent, uplifting and sweepingly romantic. The sprawling, decades-spanning story features a devastating, Oscar-winning turn by Anne Hathaway as Fantine, and Hugh Jackman, Eddie Redmayne, Amanda Seyfried and Russell Crowe in other key roles. The entire film is sung-through, enhancing the melodrama of the story as it unfolds. Paris is where the majority of the action takes place, including the explosive revolt at the barricades led by Redmayne’s rebellious Marius, although most filming took place in the UK, including a recreation of the Elephant of the Bastille sculpture, which was built in Greenwich.
Paris, 13th District (2021)
One of the best films depicting modern Parisian life to have come out in recent years is Jacques Audiard’s Paris, 13th District. Based on a graphic novel by Adrian Tomine, the film, as the title suggests, is set in the 13th arrondissement in the south-east of the city, which is known for its Asian quarter, a vibrant neighbourhood with a high Vietnamese and Chinese population and not typically visited by tourists. In French, the film’s title is Les Olympiades, named after a high-rise 1970s development in the 13th arrondissement which was built to commemorate the 1968 Grenoble Winter Olympics. The romantic drama follows the messy, intertwining lives and loves of several young people who live in the neighbourhood. Like the iconic La Haine, it is stylishly filmed in black and white, lending the Paris of the film a timeless look, even though that Paris is a very contemporary one.
La Vie en Rose (2007)
Marion Cotillard won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role as Édith Piaf in this biopic of the her troubled life. We follow Piaf from her unstable childhood in Normandy and performing on the streets of Paris, to her rise to success and fame, her subsequent struggles with addiction and ill health, before her untimely death at the age of just 47. It straightforwardly follows the typical biopic format that we’ve seen so much in the past few years, but Cotillard’s performance is powerful, and the grimy depictions of the places she grew up, through to the cabarets of mid-century Paris, are immersively done.
