5 films set in Paris to watch if you loved Emily in Paris

In recent days, all fans of the popular series Emily in Paris have been able to watch the new episodes of their iconic heroine, this time divided between the titular city and Rome, which has become her new home. For all those who are nostalgic for the atmosphere of the city of love par excellence, we have decided to prepare a special with five titles, including classic art-house films and others, set precisely in those magical places that cinema has depicted on multiple occasions.

After all, there are few cities in the world that have maintained such a carnal, symbiotic, and mutable relationship with the Seventh Art as Paris. The historical cradle of cinema, where the Lumière brothers first projected their dreams, it has never limited itself to the passive role of a scenic backdrop. Paris is, to all intents and purposes, a true co-star: capable of changing its skin, becoming now a glossy postcard for impossible loves, now a gray labyrinth of existential solitudes, now an dreamlike stage where the real gives way to the surreal. From strolls along the Seine to the cramped apartments of the Rive Gauche, from the grand boulevards to the narrow streets of Montmartre, films have mapped every inch of it. In this special, we traverse five decades and five diametrically opposed visions, to discover how the same city can contain infinite worlds, reflected in the gaze of as many great authors.

Breathless (1960, Jean-Luc Godard)

It is the year zero of cinematic modernity, the moment when film grammar is disassembled and reassembled on the sidewalks of the Champs-Élysées. Jean-Luc Godard takes monumental Paris and shakes it with a handheld camera, transforming it into a feverish and anarchic hunting ground. The French capital here has nothing romantic in the classical sense: it is dirty, noisy, frantic, the perfect theater for the aimless escape of Jean-Paul Belmondo's Michel Poiccard.

Paris becomes both accomplice and trap. The director films the city by "stealing" shots among the unaware crowd, capturing a documentary truth that clashes with the artifice of film noir. From newspaper offices to cheap hotels, the city pulses with an out-of-control jazz rhythm, emphasizing the urgency of a generation rushing towards nothingness, until that tragic and iconic epilogue, where the Parisian asphalt welcomes the purest soul, the manifesto, of the Nouvelle Vague.

Angel-A (2005, Luc Besson)

Luc Besson strips the city of its saturated colors to dress it in a tormented, polished, and hyperrealistic black and white, which renders a metropolis almost deserted, suspended in an indefinite time. The story of the improbable encounter between a small indebted con man and a mysterious, very blonde and very tall woman, is a pretext for an intimate exercise in style, far from the director's usual approach, with the two protagonists Jamel Debbouze and Rie Rasmussen embodying the multiple faces of Paris.

Paris here becomes a purgatory of steel and stone, with the director of Léon (1994) using the bridges over the Seine as places of transition between life and death, between despair and potential rebirth. Emptied of the chaos of traffic and people, it becomes a mirror of the souls of the antithetical and complementary characters, reflecting in the river's waters and in the vertical architectures the solitude of two figures trying to swim against the current through their nascent bond.

Holy Motors (2012, Leos Carax)

A nocturnal, mad, and melancholic odyssey that traverses the body of Paris as if it were an organism in decay and at the same time in perpetual mutation. Leos Carax takes us aboard a white limousine, a mobile dressing room for the mysterious Monsieur Oscar (a gigantic Denis Lavant), engaged in playing various "roles" in as many corners of the city. It is a requiem for the analog era, a film that shatters all narrative logic to become a pure sensory experience, disturbing and fascinating in equal measure.

All this in a suggestive open-air stage, an infinite set where each neighborhood hosts a different cinematic genre. From the dirty realism of the sewers to the decadent magnificence of former department stores, the capital becomes an elusive place, populated by monsters, diverse humanity, and digital creatures. The director films a Paris that is a memory of cinema itself, a place where reality no longer exists, except as performance, for one of the most important films of the last decade.

An American in Paris (1951, Vincente Minnelli)

If there is a Paris of dreams, platonic and perfect, it is the one largely reconstructed in the MGM studios by Vincente Minnelli. Here the city ceases to be a geographical location to become a state of mind, an explosion of Technicolor dancing to the notes of George Gershwin. Gene Kelly, a painter and former soldier who served in France during the war, moves in a world where art and life merge seamlessly.

It is the triumph of appearance over reality. Minnelli does not seek fidelity, but pictorial evocation: the sets recall the canvases of the Impressionists, transforming every scene into a moving painting. Paris here is the very idea of romanticism, a mental city where feelings are so vast that they can only be expressed through a 17-minute ballet that remains one of the absolute peaks of the classic musical.

Amélie (2001, Jean-Pierre Jeunet)

Probably the title you were most looking forward to, so much so that many vacations to Paris are now organized to visit the locations where it was filmed. With this film, Jean-Pierre Jeunet achieves a cult operation through and through: his Paris is a box of chocolates, a hyper-saturated microcosm tinged with green and red, where every detail, from the garden gnome to the photo booth, acquires a magical significance. It is a modern fairy tale that celebrates the beauty of small things and kindness as a revolutionary act.

Montmartre has never been so fairytale-like. The director gives us a timeless neighborhood, almost an enchanted village suspended above the rest of the metropolis. Parisian topography (from Canal Saint-Martin to the Café des 2 Moulins) becomes the chessboard on which the Amélie Poulain of the irresistible Audrey Tautou moves and moves her emotional pawns, transforming Paris into a huge playground for lonely hearts in search of their soulmate.