Here’s a dreamy, quirky, well-acted but weirdly misjudged movie that I couldn’t make friends with. It is a romance in a New Wave style, with the British-French film-maker Jethro Massey making his feature debut as writer-director in the Venice critics’ week section. The Paul and Paulette of the title hang out in Paris, have sex and conversations in a way that perhaps conjures sense-memories of Jacques Rivette. Paul, played by Jérémie Galiana, is a young American in Paris, yearning to be a photographer, but forced to take a dull job in a real estate office; here he finds himself having an affair with his demanding female boss, nicknamed “Goebbels”, one of the film’s many baffling and tonally calamitous Nazi gags.
In the Place de la Concorde, formerly the Place de la Révolution, Paul is enraptured by the sight of Paulette (Marie Benati), an elegant, beautiful and stylish young French woman who is kneeling down in a trance, fervently imagining what it was like to be Marie Antoinette on the point of execution. He takes her picture, they get talking – amusingly, she asks him to cut her hair then and there, just like Marie Antoinette before the guillotine. They have a friendship with a sensual element: they talk about their current romances and Paulette tells him about her preoccupation with Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley (pretty cliched fan crushes these, surely, and sadly the film has nothing very new or interesting to say on the subjects). Finally, Paul and Paulette go and see her parents in Salzburg where her dad rather shrewdly says that the similarity of their names makes them sound like siblings – and perhaps in a way that is what they are.
So far, so diverting. Yet the film leaves a strange taste in the mouth with the bath they’re taking in the title. It happens in Munich, in an apartment that Paul has rented for them using his real-estate contacts; it is an apartment that he imagines or pretends or has been told is where Adolf Hitler lived as a young man. There have been a few more Hitler conversations in the film before this and Paul and Paulette playfully call each other “Eva” and “Adolf” in the bath.
The truth about this flat is clarified later (and the tiniest bit of Googling would have revealed that of course Hitler’s flat is not available for Airbnb-type short-term lets). But why did Paul think this was an adorably romantic or impetuous thing to pretend? It’s such a silly and wince-inducing wrong move for this film to take, and it undermines all the other factually real interludes, such as Paul and Paulette’s visit to the site of the 19th-century “human zoo” in the Bois de Vincennes, an odious colonial exhibition of subject peoples.
And as if the Hitler apartment scenes weren’t sufficiently jarring, Paul winds up in a desolate mood implausibly renting a flat supposedly occupied by one of the Bataclan killers, another very peculiar false note. A shame, because there is obvious talent at work here on both sides of the camera.