Avenue Montaigne (2006)

A surprisingly delightful movie, Avenue Montaigne, also known as Fauteuils d'orchestre, is a character-driven study of aging, love, pain, loss, and life changes.

Set in Paris, the film follows the lives of a waitress, an art collector and his son, a concert pianist and his wife, and an actress for three days. And they are a very busy three days.

Our main character, if you can call her that, is Jessica, a 20-something girl from the suburbs who comes to Paris to find a job. She arrives in Paris without a place to live or knowing if she’ll find work at all. She winds up getting a job as a waitress and gets to start working the day of her interview. This was the only part of the film that I found totally unrealistic. Who moves to a strange city without knowing where they will live or how they will support themselves? Anyway, I digress. Always in the right place at the right time, Jessica quickly meets the neighborhood celebrities: An elderly art collector who is auctioning off his collection, and his son, who is still grieving the loss of his mother and upset with his father for selling the art the couple collected together over a lifetime; a 40-something concert pianist who loves to play the piano, but wants to give up playing professionally because he’s tired of wearing tuxedos and traveling from city to city and concert hall to concert hall to play for people who know too much about music, and his wife, who made her life out of scheduling his concerts and being by his side at every glamorous event; and a 40-something soap opera actress, who, though she is well paid for her television work, longs to perform more serious and creative roles. The climax of the film is the night of the art collector’s auction, pianist’s final performance, and actress’s opening night.

But the plot isn’t what is special about this film. What’s special is the amazing range of feelings the characters go through along the way. And they’re honest feelings. In one scene we see Jessica sitting on the roof of the concert hall in the rain, alone in a strange city, with no friends and no where to go, and you can feel her loneliness, her fear, and most importantly, her courage to face this incredibly frightening situation head-on. Many of the characters faced issues of growing older, and having their wants and needs and place in life changing. The art collector misses his wife, but refuses to stop living even though his wife has died. And we see crisises in relationships. Can the pianist’s wife be happy by her husband’s side in a house by a lake? Is love enough? The issues and feelings raised in the film are ones we have all felt and have dealt with or will deal with in our lives.

And I loved how for the most part, the characters, even the totally crazy actress, were very self-aware. No holding in feelings, no pretending to be someone that they’re not, but real, flawed people who were growing and learning and trying to be better people.

Something that I thought was really interesting was that all the music in the film is music that is being heard by the people in the movie. It’s the music the pianist is playing, or the pop music the retiring theater superintendant is listening to on her headphones. The soundtrack isn’t artificial, it’s part of the scene, part of the characters’ lives.

It was so nice to see beautiful, breathtaking long shots of Paris. The Eiffel Tower is nearly always in view, and the city lit-up at night is lovely.

I know many people don’t like to see movies with subtitles, but I found that they were not distracting at all. The dialogue is very comfortably paced, and I didn’t find that I missed any of the facial expressions or gorgeous scenery by reading the subtitles.