User Reviews

A group of (loose) friends get involved in a drinking competition, held in a well-known Bologna nightlife hotspot, "il Pratello". The prize is a night with a beautiful and ageing transsexual lady. They drink, drink and drink, revealing much about themselves, they puke on screen and let themselves loose, in more than one sense. Shot in "fly on the wall" style, it's close to docu-fiction mode: the characters drink for real and the core scenes are unscripted. I am from Bologna and many, if not all characters, were at the time familiar faces, friends, acquaintances. There's a raw, embarrassing quality about Paris, Dabar: a puzzling mix of vitality and squalor, "no future" and pursuit of pleasure. When we first saw it, we felt fascinated and somewhat ashamed: it's like we had never realised beforehand such pockets of drabness and hopelessness in the lives of people we had actually met, filmed in the very places we went out to have a good time. Seeing it again after some seven years, Paris, Dabar looks nearly like a period piece and it's difficult not to feel somewhat tender towards its candour and realism. One of the actors, Roberto Bozzetti, died shortly after the completion of the movie and this certainly adds to the feeling of looking at a world which is irremediably gone. The darkness and vitality that pervade Paris, Dabar were certainly there even if we were partially unaware of this; it's rather mesmerizing to see them depicted so exactly on screen, even if one can't help but being somewhat relieved to be far away. Uplifting? Not at all. Interesting? Certainly yes.