FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

Mandeep Tyson The acting in this movie is really good.

calvinnme When a man awakens from his nightly sleep and leaves his quarters atop the Eiffel Tower, he discovers all of Paris is empty. After wandering for a bit, he finds that the people haven't vanished, they are all frozen in place like statues. He joins up with a merry band of people that land in an airplane, and they have fun in the empty city. Eventually, though, things start to turn ugly, and they need to get to the bottom of what happened to the city.This is an early version of films like I Am Legend, in the sense that one of the chief joys is seeing a normally bustling city like Paris devoid of movement. Clair managed several impressive shots of empty streets and parks, although the effect is broken occasionally by a moving boat or train in the distance. At only 35 minutes, there isn't a lot of time for things like plot development or deep characterization. The main point here is silly fun. The version I watched had the title cards in French only, but the story is clear enough from the on screen action that this doesn't prove much of a problem. This was listed in 101 Best Sci-Fi Films book.

chaos-rampant The watchman on the top level of the Eiffel Tower comes out to find the whole of Paris asleep and frozen into position, drivers in their cars, passers-by, policemen just seconds before an arrest. He joins up with a group of people who were flying over Paris when it happened, to enjoy newfound freedom without limits.One way to view this is as conceived; a comedy by way of surrealism and the absurd so far as the premise is concerned, and mostly harmless execution. A scientist is responsible we discover, who has devised a contraption that controls the flows of reality.Or you can read between the images. I study what it means to meditate and effective conveyance of this through cinema, so this rings loud and clear to my eyes.So we have the narratives that make up the bulk of day-to-day life arrested, doesn't matter how, and only those who were above ground spared from the effect. They walk through a still world full of possibilities for reflection, the only ones 'awake' among sleepers dreaming their routines. Of course being ordinary human beings, what do they do? They drink and dance, they indulge themselves, and when boredom sinks in, they fight for the one woman in their company. Narratives are resumed and stopped again, as the scientific mastermind, someone who is trying to master mind, tinkers with the equations.The quest is for a still center, discovered in the arms of the woman.It was perhaps too early in the medium to add further layers, for instance to link control of reality with the mind desiring images or desiring escape from them. Maybe, if this was Epstein's film who had by then stumbled on a theory about the eye in motion. It is fine to have just this at any rate, concerned more with visual invention than introspection. There are guerilla shots from inside moving cars, frozen and resumed, that do Nouvelle Vague thirty years early.If you are an imaginative viewer, you will want to see the first half with its eerily empty boulevards and plazas, and imagine a silent horror film about some unspecified apocalypse.

Igenlode Wordsmith Sadly, I found that this film seriously outstayed its interest; it starts off well with an intriguing concept, that of the lone survivor in a mysteriously abandoned city, and develops this into a socio-comic commentary on the worthlessness of money and valuables in unlimited supply, compared to the real necessities of life. The handful of survivors who find each other become bored of their effortless scroungers' existence and start quarrelling among themselves -- saved only by the arrival of the long-awaited signal from the outside world.Thus far, thus John Wyndham (there are strong parallels here with the novel "The Day of the Triffids"). This silent film is somewhat heavy on its use of intertitles (which do inevitably suffer in translation), is not especially distinguished in its acting and as a comedy not particularly funny. But, having explained away preceding events by invoking a mad professor and then wound up his story by an 'and then they all went back to their previous lives' scene, the film-maker then commits the cardinal error of pressing the reset button -- or in this case, throwing the freeze-ray switch yet again. And again.We get a whole new segment of story driven by the financial travails of only two of the previous five characters, who can't face being poor after having had the whole city to glean from and decide to freeze everybody again so that they can rob them. Only the professor notices, so he reverses the switch yet again... demonstrates to his disbelieving colleague, jerking everybody on and off... the world 'compensates' by being cranked extra fast, Keystone-fashion... and the whole thing descends into slapdash tedium of a fairly primitive kind, which has ceased some time earlier to be entertaining. More or less the entirety of the second half of the film could have been cut (from the young couple parting outside the Eiffel Tower straight to the finding of the ring), and only to its improvement.This film was shown in a double-bill with Buster Keaton's "Three Ages", a film shot in the same year and similarly using camera trickery (what must be one of the earliest animated cartoon sequences featuring a live actor). The comparison was not at all to the favour of "Paris qui dort", alas, which dragged terribly and came across as much more wordy and primitive; it's not entirely fair to judge it against an action comedy, but it is in the frenetic action sequences that this film is the weakest. One gets the impression that the director had just run out of ideas. By the ending of the film I was seriously bored; the Keaton, despite a poor print, woke up the audience (in at least one case, literally) like a shot.

Polaris_DiB It's always nice to watch various films from a relatively long time ago in order to get a grasp of what set the standards for the discourses of today. "Paris qui dort" is a science fiction short which establishes several motifs of today's science fiction fancy.Paris sleeps. People who were high above the ground, either in the Eiffel Tower or in an airplane come down to find a city almost frozen in time. Water, machines, regular things move, it's just that all the people are asleep. The characters then get to live their wildest dreams of freedom and riches until it just starts to not work out for them.Some images, such as the initial main character's approach to a fountain, are immediately recognized as used in 28 Days Later... The sleeping people are often set in the same sort of not-quite-frozen, not-quite animated set-up that's later used in Dark City. It's interesting to see such images become inspiration for entire other works we recognize today.Unfortunately, the short itself hardly feels able to stand on its own anymore. The initial shot of a static Paris has cars moving at the edge of the frame. The characters' own boredom unfortunately connects well with the modern audiences own. However, it's still creative and interesting enough to be worthy of recognition and to be respected for what it's done.--PolarisDiB