Christophe Honoré's Dans Paris (2006)

Dans Paris is Christophe Honoré's third feature film and is something of a remembrance of Nouvelle Vague movies, in particular those of Truffaut, but there's also a hint of Godard. The film stars two brothers: Paul (Romain Duris) and Jonathan (Louis Garrel, the director Philippe's son). Paul is depressive after having split up from his long-term partner, and has joined his sex-crazy student brother at their father's flat overlooking the Tour d'Eiffel.

The father is the Italian Mirko (Guy Marchard), who reads La Repubblica and was the husband of their mother (played by Marie-France Pisier), who has a fleeting bit part in this. Mirko does his best to console Paul and control Jonathan.

Paul seems suicidal: he films himself with a mouthful of pills, only to spit them out; he appears on his father's balcony on tiptoe, as if about to join the mobile phone he has sent, splintering, to the pavement below; and, on the only 'trip' he takes out, he jumps into the Seine but survives: just before Christmas this seems unlikely, but then his brother will later do the same and survive too.

Johnathan (casting himself as the narrator and looking directly at the camera like a Truffaut character) is a very different personality: while Paul spends his time in his dressing gown and underpants crying in the room and listening and singing along to Kim Wilde's 'Cambodia' (on an old 45 rmp), Jonathan is out in Paris, wandering around much like Truffaut's Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud) in the streets of Paris. In a day Jonathan beds three women and returns to his father's in the early hours of the morning to find some rapport with Paul, looking through a child's picture book about a wolf and a rabbit, which they knew by heart as children.