Leos Carax
2012
115 minutes
This is kind of a bonkers movie directed by Leos Carax and starring Denis Lavant, whom you know best as the main guy from Beau Travail. In this film, Lavant plays an odd man who seems to be an actor of some sort, who gets taken around to various "gigs" around Paris getting into costume and makeup and playing different fantastic characters, mostly in public, for mysterious reasons. This includes everything from an old woman begging for money, a hired killer, a man whose wife and family are chimpanzees, an elderly man, a dad picking up his daughter from school, and the infamous Monsieur Merde. The latter is a feral man who emerges from the sewer and goes on a rampage in a cemetery where he starts eating flowers, bites off a woman's fingers, and kidnaps a model during a photoshoot and drags her back into the sewers Phantom of the Opera-style. None of this is ever explained, it just sort of unfolds on film in front of you. Oh, and Kylie Minogue shows up and sings a lovely song.
During your time in Paris you held out as long as you could before making the obligatory trip to Jim Morrison's grave, partly just because you wanted to see a little bit more of the neighborhood it was nestled within. It was an awkward trip. You were there near the end of the day and the cemetery is utterly enormous. You had to do your best to hurry and not get lost inside. It became obvious that the cemetery was still in use and several families had crypts that contained the remains of recent escapees of cette chienne de vie. It was a little tacky and disturbing to see all the liquor bottles and band stickers and other detritus that cover the plot containing Jim Morris' remains, but at least people were appropriately quiet while you were there and none of the mess spilled over to other graves. It was also very rattling to see the grave of one of the Bataclan victims nearby from the terrorist mass shooting of 2015. It was quite obvious during your visit that the spectre of that attack has cast a long shadow on the city.
Back home in Baltimore, you live only a few blocks from a similarly large and old urban cemetery, Greenmount Cemetery, which takes up multiple city blocks. That cemetery's most notable inhabitants are John Wilkes Booth and the guy who invented the Ouija board. People sometimes leave pennies on the grave of John Wilkes Booth to spite him. The grave which holds Edgar Allan Poe's remains is in the garden cemetery of a church downtown. The notorious Poe toaster used to leave bottles of liquor on his grave, but it's not clear if this has been discontinued. His grave, which you've visited a few times with out-of-towners, often attracts weird little tributes from visitors. One of the more notable things you've seen piled on his grave is a dead bird, which may or may not have been someone's pet at some point. You chalked this up to Baltimore being a sad, weird place.
Time to choose something different: