Parker Posey, in all of her snappy, cynical fashion, is enchanting in Broken English. She is alone in New York as most of us are, and her hotel job leaves her with fleeting, if any satisfaction. She fucks too fast and hopes for more though knows not to, she's a bitch to her friends to spite their happiness, and rejects the wishes of her mom in the face of a witch doctor.
Parker Posey is just like me.
In the dialectical mid 2000s rom com manner, she spends an evening at a house party of a friend from college at which she is introduced to Julien, a frenchmen who I think would be perfect if not for his skeezy looking fedora. The two spend a number of days together, and we see Nora (Posey) in her most vulnerable state thus far, giving herself over to a love embedded in transient convinction*. Days later, Julien is leaving; cries of "come with me to paris!" yadayada, Nora is yet again hopeless and returns to her miserable New York schlep until a sweep of passion convinces her to flea to Paris to find her now departed French beau, obviously accompanied by Drea de Matteo (very: carmella and rosalie's excursion to France in Season 6 of the Sopranos), they hop a flight to reunite with Julien. How romantic! Though, nothing is as easy as it should be in the merciless hands of a 105 minute romantic comedy structure, as Nora has now lost Julien's phone number. She is vulnerable and frantic and dragging her best friend along with her in her lovesick, distraught Paris journeys. We watch Nora stumble around the city, meeting various other men who equally as endearing but far less captivating than our pre-established love interest. After days of cafés and increased financial struggles which somehow didn't present themselves as problematic sooner, Nora defeatedly makes her way to the Paris metro where she finds Julien on the same car. Telephone miscommunications behind them, the two clumsily reunite and they run off into probably some like perfect bistro in Montmarte and have a beautiful Parisian life together.
Parker Posey is just like me!
I kid. I have not been pursued by a Parisian man, and there is no enigmatic finale to my story of finding true love or missing my flight or anything of the sort. Lo and behold though, now I have been to Paris! Amidst what had been a difficult few weeks in Spain, I patiently awaited my departure to a city I had never imagined myself stepping foot in (thinking also: brussels, oslo, dublin, etc). I would see someone I love, I would eat and drink and see that which one anticpiates in a place like Paris. Something I have learned since being here, especially amidst the weeks I remained angstily in Spain, is that I am definitely, absolutely, 100%, an American (surprise!). I find no kindred connection to other cities or places and if I do, it is under a false guise of replacability, something the US, and New York is incompatable with. When I went to Paris, I was suredly as American as ever. This illicited a feeling of alienation in myself from my surroundings, also not unfamiliar at this point in my time in Europe, but certainly poignant and glaringly obvious in my hips and my kissing the wrong cheek first.
But like Parker, I found excitement in the chaos I experienced in Paris. My blood pressure felt dangerously high as I worried I no longer belonged in a metropolis and heard young, brooding, parisian intellectuals fawn over their combined successes and favorite philosophers. Occasionally, my angst heightened, resenting everything and everyone around me, wishing they spoke no english at all, or wishing that I didn't. I spoke spanish and later I danced and stumbled to my hostel bed full of more beer I've ever drunk and a heart worn out and pulled in a billion, inexhaustable directions. I felt consumed and enamored with young people, youth was ringing in my ear and it was unnverving and exciting. Not even that of my own, but the way it is discovered in awe inspiring buildings, in wine and sun on the street, in chainsmoking and crosswalks void of cigarette butts, institutions and centers for art and magic swarmed with young people and tourists likemyself.
This is not a love letter to Paris, I know simply nothing of that place and can speak minimally to its co-existence with the young people that inhabit its streets that made me feel so new. This, rather, is a profession of my love for youth. Youth which I am so barely accquainted with, depriving myself of it for months, maybe even years, in an attempt to experience it filled with 'shoulds' and 'shouldn'ts'. Succumbing my young life to illy placed standards and prophecies that will never consummate, I have spent my youth angry and hungry for control in corrupted means, each approach more deceitful and inauthentic than the next. In seeing unfettered youth in its ugliness and in its beauty, in ways which I found silly and ways which aroused me, I am left hungry for so much more than control. I want to learn to love in all of my horridness and silliness and sultriness, revel in things in me that are ugly and that which are beautiful. I speak these words as nothing other than a twenty year old, rich with youth and understanding and a lackthereof.
I stumbled through Paris feverishly and for much of the time, like Parker Posey, I felt like shit. In the end, I did not reunite with a lover, French or otherwise, I cried into a sandwich at the Charles de Gaulle airport. But I have returned, albeit briefly, equally as feverish but all the more enlivened.
*Parker Posey is an actor who I think is perfect for these moments in films, and I wish I saw it more