After its run at the 2024 Venice Critics’ Week, where it won the coveted Audience Award, Paul & Paulette Take a Bath begins its international journey with a UK release. Directed by Jethro Massey and starring Jérémie Galiana and Marie Benati, it revives a kind of cinema with a vintage allure that now feels scarce: bold, eccentric, and unafraid of finding beauty in discomfort.
The story follows Paul, an American photographer living in Paris, who one day meets Paulette, a Parisian fascinated by the city’s darkest chapters. What begins as a casual encounter turns into a series of walks and conversations through places marked by atrocities: from Marie Antoinette’s guillotine to sites tied to Hitler, dictators, and notorious Parisian crimes. Together, they re-stage these episodes in a tone that blends comedy and absurdity, not to trivialize them, but to highlight the surreal ways history is remembered when filtered through playfulness.
Along the way, unusual romances and offbeat emotional bonds emerge, breaking with genre expectations. The undeniable chemistry between Galiana and Benati sustains the film: their interplay of attraction, unease, and complicity powers each scene and keeps the narrative tension alive.
Visually, Massey shoots with echoes of the Nouvelle Vague and the spirit of auteur romantic comedies, crafting an atmosphere both light and sophisticated. It’s the kind of cinema that is no longer common and whenever a film like this appears, it carries the potential to become a cult jewel, playing with time, humor, and the spectator’s sense of disorientation.
By the end, as eccentric as it may seem, one can’t help but wonder: am I really considering what I just saw to be romantic? Because yes, it is. Within all its bizarre edges, it is romantic… and a little psychopathic. I’ll leave you with that question.
Paul & Paulette Take a Bath, directed by Jethro Massey, premieres on September 5 in the UK and Ireland.
