Paul & Paulette Take a Bath: a picture-perfect tour of Paris’s ugly past

How soon is too soon, when it comes to using historical atrocities as material for flights of fantasy? It took only five years for Paul Greengrass and Oliver Stone to release their fictionalised versions of the events of 9/11 with United 93 and World Trade Center (both 2006). Alice Winocour’s Revoir Paris, loosely based on the Bataclan attacks of 2015, came out seven years later, in 2022. Meanwhile, 80 years after the end of World War II, debates over the ethics of filming the Holocaust continue, with Jonathan Glazer’s 2023 The Zone of Interest the most recent work to polarise critics. While most directors confine their musings on the rights and wrongs of historical fiction to the press circuit (see Michael Haneke’s excoriating takedown last year of Schindler’s List, 1993), Jethro Massey’s first feature places the subject front and centre. Paul & Paulette Take a Bath tracks the eponymous pair’s progress around Paris as they try to recreate some of the more macabre moments in the city’s history – something that filmmakers do all the time.

American photographer Paul (Jérémie Galiana) first encounters the manic pixie girl of his morbid dreams in a sunlit Place de la Concorde, where Paulette (Marie Benati) is repeatedly tracing the final steps of Marie-Antoinette to the guillotine. He takes her photo, then takes her to the last queen of France’s prison cell, where he shears her hair at the neck, as was common practice before executions. A tentative friendship forms as the couple embarks upon a series of pilgrimages to Paris’s dark past, Paul striving to impress Paulette with his historical expertise. At Père Lachaise Cemetery they visit the Communards’ Wall, where 147 soldiers were executed on 28 May 1871, and play at shooting one another. In the Jardin d’Acclimatation, they pose as the African peoples once ‘exhibited’ in a human zoo.

This view of Paris is at once strange and familiar. Many of the locations rarely appear on screen since they are, ironically in this context, considered places of respect for the dead. But the film also reveals the gore that tacitly undergirds so much of the city’s history. Strolling along the Seine, Paul points out to Paulette the various sites where Maurice Papon’s police force drowned Algerian protesters in 1961. A montage of drawings traces the evolution of the bloody circus surrounding the Arc de Triomphe. These sinister stories are juxtaposed with postcard-pretty images.

The title evokes Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) and shares its atmosphere of sun-strewn whimsy. There are shades here too, of Truffaut and Rohmer, and of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie (2001). Paris has never looked so lovely, or indeed so white. The preposterously comely central pair live in parquet-floored apartments scattered with objets d’art and each has a smattering of on-and-off lovers. When they are not naked – and they are naked a lot – they are styled in chic vintage clothing by costume designer Joanna Wojtowicz. A French-touch inflected soundtrack calls to mind Sofia Coppola’s work with Air on The Virgin Suicides (1999), as well as her own attempt at retelling history in Marie Antoinette (2006). Just occasionally, the music is punctuated by the fantastical swish of an imagined guillotine or rattle of bullets.

To paraphrase the journalist Lisa Kennedy, the risk of borrowing from the enormous in order to entertain is exploitation. Certain critics have taken issue with what they perceive as Paul and Paulette’s trivialising of deadly serious events, not least during the scene that gives the film its title, in which the couple swap genders to roleplay Hitler and Eva Braun (Massey’s script was inspired by the famous photo of Lee Miller in the Führer’s bathtub). It is often unclear what is at stake in these re-enactments beyond a kind of mawkish true-crime obsession. Paulette is a fan of Marilyn and Elvis; one running gag has the couple trying to track down the latter’s pubic hair. There’s a suggestion that she, at least, is repeating public history to work through personal trauma, a psychological theme treated with more nuance and commitment in David Cronenberg’s 1996 Crash. Paul, on the other hand, seems driven by little more than infatuation. When the film’s moral reckoning comes, as it inevitably does, it feels unearned.

But if Massey fails to stick the landing, the film nonetheless carries a certain earnest charm. Ultimately Paul & Paulette is a lot like its leads: handsome, well-intentioned and a little misguided. Or, in the words of one character: “It’s inappropriate. I like it.” 

► Paul & Paulette Take a Bath is in UK cinemas from 5 September.