Le joli mai

Is Paris the most beautiful city in the world, asks the lyrical, meditative voiceover at the beginning of the film. "One would want to guess at it using only the tools of detectives in novels: A telescope and a microphone." Not forgetting the camera that Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme point at the French capital and its inhabitants in the first May after the end of the Algerian War. At the heart of this symbiosis of essay, film poem and "Ciné, ma vérité" (to quote Marker himself) are a series of meandering conversations with a wide variety of people, interviewed randomly on the street or in an arranged way at the living room table. The topics are freedom, happiness, and love, but also miserable wages, grim living conditions, injustice, and police violence. (mg)