Director – Xavier Gens, Screenplay – Yannick Dahan, Xavier Gens & Maud Heywang, Adaptation – Yael Langmann & Olivier Torres, Based on an Idea by Sebastien Aucher & Edouard Duprey, Producers – Vincent Roget & Bastien Sirodot, Photography – Nicolas Massart, Music – Alex Cortes, Anthony D’Amario & Edouard Rigaudiere, Visual Effects Supervisor – Arnaud Fouquet, Visual Effects – Digital District (Supervisor – Marc-Thomas Cave), MPC & UFX (Supervisor – Julien Van De Velde), Special Effects – Atelier 69 & Big Bang SFX, Production Design – Hubert Pouille. Production Company – Let Me Be/UMedia/UFund/Kaly Productions/Program Store.
Cast
Berenice Bejo (Sophia Assalas), Nassim Lyes (Adil Faez), Lea Leviant (Mika), Sandra Parfait (Caro), Aksel Ustun (Nils), Aurelia Petit (Angele), Anne Marivin (The Mayor), Nagisa Morimoto (Ben), Marvin Dubart (Markus), Daouda Keita (Leopold), Ibrahim Ba (Adama), Jean-Marc Bellu (Berrutti), Yannick Choirat (Chris Assalas), Inaki Lartigue (Juan), Victor Pontecorvo (Sam), Thomas Espinera (Tom), Anais Parello (Jade)
Plot
Sophia Assalas is a marine biologist who leads a team as they follow a tracker attached to the shark Lilith to a vast island of floating plastic trash. They are startled to find that Lilith has grown three times her size, before she turns and devours the rest of Sophia’s team. Three years later, Sophia is working as an aquarium guide in Paris. She is approach by Mika, who heads a group of young conservationists who explains they are following the tracker still in Lilith, seeking to protect her from whalers. Mika then reveals that Lilith is in Paris, swimming in the Seine. As bodies are found, Sophia tries to warn the River Police but this is dismissed until divers go down and are devoured. Sophia realises that Lilith has evolved to breed by pathogenesis, giving birth to a whole shiver of sharks. She joins the River Police as they try to warn the mayor. However, the mayor dismisses them and is insistent that an Olympic triathlon with athletes swimming in the Seine go ahead.
French director Xavier Gens has become a regular genre voice after making his directorial debut with the gore-drenched Frontier(s) (2007). From there he went on to make the English-language videogame adaptation Hitman (2007), the harrowing The Divide (2011) about the survivors of a nuclear holocaust slowly descending into barbarism in a fallout shelter, the X is for XXL segment of The ABCs of Death (2012), the exorcism film The Crucifixion (2017) and Cold Skin (2017), a Lovecraftian film about lighthouse keepers at siege from amphibian creatures. He has also produced the Stephen King adaptation Cell (2016).
There have been a great many killer shark films ever since the powerhouse that was Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). This was followed by a host of B-budget copies for several years after. The late 2000s saw a tidal wave of deliberately ridiculous killer shark films with the likes of Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus (2009) and Sharknado (2013), which saw many sequels and copies. These gonzo takes have been the predominating take on the killer shark film – see Killer Shark Films.
Amid these usually cheap and ridiculous films, there have also been a reasonable body of better-budgeted serious survival-minded shark films with the likes of The Reef (2010), The Shallows (2016) and 47 Meters Down (2017). Under Paris is not quite one of these. For one, the title doesn’t exactly suggest a killer shark film so much as it does a work about the catacombs of Paris – when I first read the title, I was immediately reminded of the horror film As Above So Below (2014), which takes place in the city’s catacombs. (The catacombs are visited here in some scenes but most of the action takes place in the river).
Berenice Bejo and Lilith the shark under the floating sea of plasticBerenice Bejo as marine biologist Sophia Assalas
If anything, Under Paris resembles a serious and better budgeted remake of Shark in Venice (2008), the film that kicked off the deliberately ridiculous shark film fad, which had sharks prowling the canals of Venice. This is essentially the same film but transferred to Paris and with sharks in the Seine. Anne Marivin does a particularly good variation on the Murray Hamilton mayor from Jaws, which has become a staple figure of the genre representing cowardly and obstreperous officialdom – this time she refuses to countenance the idea of any shark attacks because of no less than an Olympic triathlon!
Xavier Gens directs some gripping scenes, particularly so from the opening scene with the shark attacking under a floating atoll of plastic waste products and Berenice Bejo being dragged down to the depths as she is caught up by plastic attached to the shark. There is a particularly tense sequence where Lea Leviant attempts to confront the shark in an underground catacomb. Although the film’s highlight is a spectacular sequence with multiple sharks attacking swimmers as the Olympic event goes ahead, which includes soldiers attempting to eliminate the sharks with heavy weaponry, explosions from buried artillery at the bottom of the river, sharks leaping out of the water and even a tidal wave.
Under Paris also comes with strong Environmentalist concerns. The film takes up and talks about the issues of shark conservation, even if it blurs sympathies later in the show in having the young radical shark conservationist (Lea Leviant) be the one who unleashes mayhem. The show opens with Berenice Bejo and her crew amid a floating sea of plastic, where the threat perversely looks quite beautiful once we get underwater and see the different coloured light refracted through it. (In fact, the film makes great pictorial uses of the river, lighting in ways that give it great beauty). The first scenes in Paris are ones with two boys fishing up junk from the bottom of the river. And once we go underwater in the Seine, we see it constantly dirty and filled with debris – if I were one of the triathlete swimmers that dive in later in the show, I would be a little concerned about the cleanliness of the water that I would be swimming in.
