Finally squalor: the Under Paris review

Police sharks.

Holy polenta people, you don’t know how hard I had to write this piece to keep myself from making jokes about the English title of Under Parisand in particular to avoid references to the Hilton family heiress of the same name and to that well-known film in which she is the protagonist and which is not The wax mask Why The wax mask does not contain “Paris” in the title. On the other hand the original title is Sous la Seine, which means “Under the Seine”, and well, as far as I know, under the Seine there is the riverbed of the Seine, and in general a lot of stones and dirt, so maybe it would have made more sense to title it “Inside the Seine”? or something similar, not “Below”.

How much bullshit for a film in which Oscar nominee Bérénice Bejo answers the question “How can there be a shark in the Seine?!” stating “When it happened with the beluga, you didn’t complain”. (it really happened, a couple of years ago) It’s not that strange that there is a shark in the Seine, I mean: they do it. There are even five different species swimming in the Thames! What sensational animals, sharks. They have been on Earth for more than 400 million years and in all this time they have changed relatively little – the latest news about it is that a hundred million years ago, since it was very hot, they invented a way to swim in the sea open instead of on the seabed, but in short, apart from these details, sharks have more or less always been sharks, they have seen everything, they have witnessed the extinction of the dinosaurs with laughter, and they continue to do their thing and kick ass. What do you want a shark in the Seine to be?

“You tell me, Nassim Lyes, protagonist of the other latest film by Xavier Gens“

Well, A Shark in the Seine is Xavier Gens’ latest film, and it’s a delight for anyone who cares about Selachians and their cinematic destiny. A basket delight, someone will say, for example the usual Fabrizio, but a basket delight that would have deserved a visit to the dining room in this hot summer which for the moment isn’t hot given that it has been raining continuously for months. But no, straight to Netflix and then behind the blackboard, unless the miracles of the algorithm manage to give it the media coverage and public and critical attention it deserves – because, I’ll tell you straight away with a firm face, Under Paris It’s the best shark movie in a long time.

Not that things have gone very well lately for our cartilaginous friends, despite a curious but always welcome revival. I won’t mention them all for you but in short, The Meg you remember it, don’t you? or maybe The Black Demon, I do not know. All rubbish that disqualified our finned friends instead of exalting them, with all the good we can wish for Jason Statham. Which in the end isn’t that we sharkists ask for much: we want some nice underwater shots, a monster with big teeth done as Darwin commands, and some massacre carried out with extreme prejudice. Do we give a damn about the outline, the glue, the characters and their three-dimensionality? No, in fact if you treat them like cannon fodder and have very little respect for their safety and humanity we are just happier.

How much humanity in this look.

Xavier has always had very little respect for the integrity and sacredness of the human body, and in this sense, despite this being his first creatures feature and although I have always played with other themes and even other languages, it was the right choice for Under Paris. I don’t know if it was his idea, if they gave it to him just when his mortgage payment was due, the fact is that, with contempt for the danger, our French friend chose to throw himself into the enterprise by extolling the most of the “shark movie” genre and treating the rest with the superficiality and ease of someone who laughs and lets out a mighty belch when you mention Godard. Let’s go with the Acronym!, then let’s talk about Oscar candidate Bérénice Bejo, sharks and humor.

Bérénice Bejo is Sophia, a sharkologist who, in a high-impact and somewhat less great, but still acceptable, CGI introductory sequence, is tracking Lilith, a mako shark in which she and her team of sharkologists are particularly interested for reasons which are never specified. Lilith lives under the Pacific trash vortex, which despite its very metal name is very ugly stuff, a gigantic blob of plastic and other rubbish that has agglomerated over the years and has reached dimensions that are frankly embarrassing for our species. Maybe it’s the microplastics, maybe it’s this hole in the ozone layer, the fact is that Lilith should be a couple of meters long and instead she has become a giantess over five meters tall, who devours herself to prove she’s a shark and therefore kicks a lot of asses Sophia’s entire team, who survives only thanks to a sensational stroke of luck.

Three years later, Sophia has been reduced to lecturing on marine biodiversity at the Paris Aquarium to groups of bored teenagers. But since Xavier Gens is also a political director (is he? Here every now and then he seems to try to prove it to us), among these teenagers there is also the activist Mika, who wears a yellow raincoat with a hood and is the founder of the SOS association – Save Our Seas (which incidentally really exists), and who, together with his colleague and girlfriend Ben, made a shocking discovery: Lilith returned, and decided that the Pacific Ocean disgusted her, so she established her new home between the waters of the Seine! With the help of a group of river policemen led by the aforementioned Nassim Lyes/Adil, Sophia and the SOS girls will have to find a way to solve this unfortunate problem of the shark in the river before it devours all the participants in the triathlon organized by the asshole mayor of Paris.

Come on, what a fucking face.

There is a lot of stuff in these few lines: the activism of young people against the disillusionment of the expert scientist and trauma survivor, the disinterest of politics, the fact that these river policemen who in theory by profession should tell people with kayaks “You can’t swim in the Seine!” are militarized up to the asshole. And maybe Under Paris an eco-thriller? Um, no: it’s not that I want to spoil the film for you, but what at first might seem like a joint ventures among a wide range of stakeholders it soon becomes a more classic matter of “leave it to us who have the weapons”. It’s probably the most irritating detail of Gens’ film: he seems to want to wink at activism, at environmentalism grassrootto Greta Thunberg et ceteraand instead he takes less than an hour to screw everything up and take the more classic route of monster hunting.

I show that, as in the best monster films, we see as little as possible, and only when it counts. Which unfortunately forces us to undergo long (maybe not very long, but still too long) sequences in which we learn about the characters and their traumas, but hey, we know that’s the price to pay for a good massacre. Gens then has the sense of humor of a person without a sense of humor, so he tries, albeit reluctantly, to take the human side of the film seriously. Obviously it fails, but who cares? We are here for something else, for the severed limbs, for the murky river water that turns red.

And for these things here.

And what should I tell you? She does it very well. Where most shark films of recent years held back, avoided exaggerating either out of modesty or for the sake of PG13 or because they had too few protagonists to make them massacre, Gens chooses the path Piranhas 3D, but always with his very serious and almost tragic face. Even in the mass deaths there is no humor, just a lot of tasty violence, much more gore than we have seen in previous cartilaginous themed films released recently. There are two sequences in particular that stand out: one that breaks Under Paris in two and gives meaning to the title for the first time, and the other which is, luckily I’ll add!, the ending, in which Gens finally doesn’t hold back and finally throws it in the right way.

What do you want to do with it? I am a simple person, and when the triathlon and the swimming race that must necessarily go ahead despite Lilith were mentioned for the first time, I rejoiced – with caution and moderation, because we are in 2024 and you never know, but Under Paris fully keeps the promise made by putting the expressions “swimming race” and “shark in the Seine” in the same sentence. And then, do you want to know something else?, despite being a contemporary, platform film and set largely underwater, it’s not too dark, and it’s just as confusing, even in a pleasant way at times. What more do you want, a crossover with Godzilla?