Under Paris

(Sous la Seine)

dir: Xavier Gens

2024

Shark movies are pretty simple. Sharks eat people. And yet the list of really good shark-based action flicks is pretty short. There’s of course Jaws. There’s The Shallows. Maybe Deep Blue Sea, but we’re tipping over into camp territory here, which leaves us with the deliberate z-grade insanity and inanity of Sharknado, and that’s it. The sequels of even these decent flicks are uniformly terrible, but that’s okay.

The template is set. Sharks still eat people. The person that knows about the shark isn’t believed until it’s too late. And then there’s always the temptation to fuck with that simplicity, which is rarely resisted.

Jaws 4: The Revenge has many jaw-dropping scenes, all for the wrongest of reasons, but, other than the shame of admitting that I’ve watched it, there’s the admission that I carry the cursed knowledge that only this movie could provide audiences.

There’s the (insane, stupid, utterly bonkers) notion that these large sharks can harbour specific malice against particular people and their families. The widow of Chief Brody (Lorraine Gary) from the first two flicks, intones with a slightly manic but also weary tone that it wasn’t really a heart attack that killed her beloved husband, it was really The Shark! Which shark, since they killed all those sharks? No, it was the Fear of the Shark that killed him! And now it’s (another large shark, for some reason) again after The Brodys. Because it can somehow track them across the world, having sniffed their DNA, maybe. And it must have its Revenge! Or are they the ones getting Revenge because they somehow killed the hero of the first two Jaws with their Fear voodoo?

Who knows? Not me, and not the makers of any of these movies. Xavier Gens has clearly seen all of the shark movies, as have many of us, and has made one that gets the whole thing right, based on the original’s template. It gets it right even down to the memorable detail of having a mayor be an obstacle to public safety because of a grasping aspiration towards power and financial concerns.

Of course, the mayor of Paris here, as played by Anne Marivin, is less a play on the great Murray Hamilton’s take on the Mayor of Amity Island, being the oleaginous Larry Vaughn, with all those stupid suits and all those avoidable deaths (across two movies), and more a take on Marine Le Pen, at a guess. She’s no less venal, no less focussed on her ambitions and the PR opportunities of running a triathlon, for some reason, on the very famous and very polluted Seine through the heart of Paris.

Every time you try to do something good for the city, though, along come these fucking do-gooders crawling out of the woodwork and telling you your ideas are bad and you should feel bad, and that your actions will cause the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands of people.

What can you do, other than glare at them, threaten them or shoot them?

I guess you can just ignore them? That seems to go so well in all those movies where this exact thing seems to happen.

I mean, what do experts know anyway? If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that people with decades of experience and technical expertise in given areas of scientific research can’t compete with some bullshit meme you saw on social media.

Enter Sophia (the great Bérénice Bejo), who’s like a shark expert or something. She and her team of divers, led by her husband, are trying to track down a mako shark they’ve tagged with a trackable beacon, which appears to be hanging out at the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. To camera Sophia describes the patch as being the size of “6 or 8 Frances”, which made me wonder why “7” got so cruelly left out of the description.

It’s a real problem, that garbage patch. Millions of tonnes of plastic just floating there, killing the marine life that try to eat it, breaking down into microplastics and causing even more harm to vast ecosystems and across the entire world, to the point where they can be found even in most people’s water supplies and even bloodstreams. It’s only one of a very small number of examples of how human activity continues to deplete and defile this gorgeous hottie of a planet.

And there there’s all that other pollution and the global warming, but that’s it, nothing else, no other examples. Anyway, right from the start, all that plastic looks bad, but it’s also caused some other changes on a genetic level to the shark they’ve been pursuing, who they call Lilith.

Lilith is huge now, massive, for a mako shark. And there is a pack of other mako sharks travelling around her, showing that the behaviour of that species has changed as well, since before they were solitary creatures that used to wear a lot of black, drink heaps and sit in the corner reading science fiction novels.

Before we even get the chance to say “are there any other aspects of these sharks that have changed because of pollution and climate change?” the sharks have made a tidy meal of the divers, chomping them to absolute bits, and Lilith even tries to serious fuck up Sophia, who wanted revenge and paid a hefty price. Being dragged down to the depths by an angry shark can’t be fun, but I can’t believe she survived.

And that’s only the opening minutes of the film! Back in Paris, a sad Sophia tries to go about her days, lecturing to bored teenagers at an aquarium about how we’re despoiling the oceans and exterminating oh so many species with our callous indifference and attachment to comfort, and the teenagers are like “hur hur, didn’t your husband get eaten by a shark? hur hur”, and she’s disconsolate.

She’s ever so sad. Le boo hoo. But then a very serious girl with blue dyed hair shirtfronts her and says “guess what, that shark who ate all those people and hates you personally is in the Seine right now!” Mika (Léa Léviant), despite being French, has put together a group of like-minded young activists who want to save, I dunno, either the oceans in general and this shark specifically, and called it SOS, Save Our Seas, which, like, isn’t French in the slightest. Surely it would be Sauveguarder Notre Mers, but the acronym wouldn’t be as punchy.

There’s a whole bunch of these young people underground somewhere, all on computers, all doing something in this weird theatre which is constantly playing some kind of ocean documentary in the background in case they forget what they’re fighting for. For… reasons, Mika and her friends can hack into the tracking system the marine biologist types use to track various wildlife, and they can switch the emitters on and off at will if they think some nefarious type is about to catch and kill some particular creature.

I’m sure that will come in handy at some point. The set up was, there’s this shark, and it eats people. The premise now is, that shark somehow now has adapted epigenetically and can do all sorts of things it couldn’t do before, and can survive in fresh water, and can probably do tax returns and mix up a tasty martini.

When Sophia, armed with the evidence from these rascally reprobates, goes to the river police, they don’t believe her at first, in fact they’re fairly dismissive. Especially Sergeant Adil (Nassim Lyes), who’s like “what would crazy sea woman know about sharks etc” But then a car gets eaten, and homeless people get eaten somehow, despite not being in the water, and you’d think the city would be like “well done shark, do more” but there’s this epic triathlon coming up, and, well, you can’t stop something like that, can you? I mean, think of the sponsors.

I’m pretty sure the tone I’ve maintained throughout doesn’t hide the fact that of course the entire thing is fucking ridiculous, but that doesn’t detract at all from what goes on. Sophia and the cops work really well together, with grudging respect, in the fact of bureaucratic inertia and an enemy that really, really hates humans for good reasons. For a flick like this, I dunno, maybe they all do need a slow build up in order for the back end of the flick to really hit home. Apart from the opening massacre, the first hour of the flick doesn’t have much if any shark action. It’s all sly, or implied. That hour goes a long way towards establishing Sophia and at least one of the cops as people willing to do anything to stop this particular shark.

And yet at exactly the hour mark, Mika, the activist who wants to “save” Lilith, inadvertently creates the scenario which allows the carnage to begin. After she delivers a very moving Greta Thunberg-esque impassioned plea to the public, it’s almost like the flick is blaming her for what ensues…

Obviously, the state of the planet and what our species has done to it is pretty fucking serious. A flick like this takes that as a starting point, and then has a lot of fun with it (though that shouldn’t be confused with the idea that this is a comedy, because it’s mostly not played for laughs at all, though there are a lot of comically ironic moments), entirely at our expense. We are the ones at fault, and we’re the ones who will pay the price, or at least the French will pay for the rest of us, at least at first.

It keeps escalating and escalating, and the way the sharks keep changing in order to up the stakes is ludicrous, but that ending, Mon Dieu, that ending. You wouldn’t get that ending in an American version of this flick, not at all. That ending made up for how cheesy, ridiculous and po-faced much of the flick is.

I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s got mostly decent looking action and digital effects (with one great shot of the red light of a flare illuminating the presence of many, many unexpected creatures in a place they shouldn’t be), even if the entire scenario is built upon so many shaky and absurd premises.

Sharks eating people, for some reason, remains eternally funny. I am not sure why, and I especially don’t know why it was so much fun to watch so many French people get eaten, but let’s just say they’re an acquired taste, just like their cuisine.

Bon Appetite!

8 times I cannot imagine how these actors said many of their lines without cracking up out of 10

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“Paris is and always will be a celebration, a great celebration” – kinda like a smorgasbord in the City of Lights - Under Paris