James' World 2

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Dolly Parton is loved for many reasons—the songwriting, the singing, the industry smarts, the cheeky cracks, the homey manner, the beauty, the verve, the hits. She is also loved for being loved and loved transcendentally. During a red-hot summer marked in part by toppled monuments to slavery and genocide, a petition arose, directed at Tennessee lawmakers, calling for Parton to be pedestalled instead. “Let’s replace the statues of men who sought to tear this country apart with a monument to the woman who has worked her entire life to bring us closer together,” the petition proposed, soon gaining some twenty-three thousand signatories.

The country-music establishment can be about as partisan as they come, a rope line of old-school apple-pie values and unquestioning patriotism. But Parton is a true diplomat. A word like “crossover” scarcely encompasses a singer admired by Vanna White (who says Parton is her role model because she “hasn’t been affected by show business”), Björk (who has called Parton’s twanged crystal timbre “immaculate”), and Nicki Minaj (who nods Parton’s way in a guest verse on Drake’s “Make Me Proud”). A Dolly Parton concert is like a local census, bringing together peoples across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and, miraculously, political affiliation.

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“America is my country, and Paris is my hometown,” wrote Gertrude Stein. Me too; or, well, almost. For the last few years I was shuttling between New York and the French capital, where my now-husband worked, and in that time Paris came to feel like a city where I had history, whose streets I could navigate by muscle memory. Now that trans-Atlantic travel is all but suspended, the closest I can get to Paris is onscreen — but, luckily, the view is fantastic.

Paris was the site of the first movie screening, back in 1895 (though the Lumière Brothers shot those first pictures in Lyon). It remains the home of Europe’s largest, most vibrant film industry — France exports more movies than any country, bar the United States.

Here I’ve picked 10 movies that transport me back to Paris, from the early days of sound cinema to the age of streaming. I’ve omitted many French movies made in English, some shot on soundstages (“An American in Paris,” “Moulin Rouge!”) and others on location (“Funny Face,” “Midnight in Paris”). Instead I’ve selected films I rely on when I want to escape America for Paris … which is quite often these days.

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The celebrated film, “Breathless”, is one of the author’s 10 picks for movies set in Paris. Jean Seberg, left, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in a scene from the 1960 film.Credit…Films Around The World

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In 1939, Herman J. Mankiewicz was a forty-two-year-old screenwriter, acclaimed in Hollywood not only for the lines of dialogue he wrote for movies but for the ones he delivered in life. In nearly a decade and a half in the business, he’d found success at Paramount working with Josef von Sternberg and with his friends the Marx Brothers, and at M-G-M writing on “Dinner at Eight” and, briefly, “The Wizard of Oz,” where he had the idea of filming Kansas in bleak black-and-white and Oz in Technicolor. But he was best known as one of the great personalities in the film business. He’d migrated to Hollywood from New York City, where he’d been The New Yorker’s first theatre critic and a member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, and he carried that group’s spirit of cynical candor and acerbic bravado to the movie community. In commissaries and at cocktail parties, he was known for his learned insights and his unpredictable politics (he wrote, at great risk, an anti-Hitler script in 1933, yet he was opposed to American involvement in the Second World War, and even called himself an “ultra-Lindbergh”) as well as for the style with which he delivered them. He was also habitually drunk and wildly impolitic, known for the scenes that he made and the insults that he flung. His work habits were notoriously dubious: a compulsive gambler, he spent ample studio time placing bets and listening to horse races; a social whirlwind, he talked the day away in person and by phone. He lampooned and defied his bosses, and got fired from every job he didn’t quit. By the summer of 1939, he was unemployed, which is how he found himself desperately available when a twenty-four-year-old newcomer to Hollywood by the name of Orson Welles offered him a job.

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Whereas Herman Mankiewicz (right) was a Hollywood insider, Orson Welles was despised by the movie industry in advance.Photograph from Everett

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DespiteDespite being an Oscar winner, the costar of an iconic J.Lo video, and also Batman, Ben Affleck is arguably most famous for his frequent displays of facial anguish. Not since Michael Jordan—who produced The Last Dance so people would stop posting memes of him crying (my story and I’m sticking to it)—has a celebrity with a thriving career become so thoroughly identified with their own emotional distress. Affleck’s various real-life winces, grimaces, and thousand-yard stares have become as familiar to us as his on-screen exploits thanks to paparazzi photographers; his on-screen performances have been eclipsed by the moments in which his real human feelings are impossible to disguise. He is equally recognizable for acting and doing the literal opposite of acting.

Since his messy and public divorce from Jennifer Garner, Affleck has been something of a tabloid Prometheus, seeming to exist in a state of constant psychic torment as penance for his sins. Naomi Fry wrote about his well-chronicled sadness for The New Yorker nearly three years ago, and the phenomenon has not abated. Last year, he was photographed smoking a cigarette while “wearing” a protective face covering across his nose, like the Lone Ranger taking a 15-minute cowboy-union-mandated break. You can almost hear him calling out to anyone present: “I’ll be back in a second. I’m going outside to rip a butt real quick.” With actual sincere apologies to Pete Davidson’s bleary, heartbroken eyes and Jon Hamm’s linen-pants-clad penis, Ben Affleck is the reigning king of male discomfort captured without the subject’s consent.

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