Too much about the plot just didn't add up, the writing was bad, some of the scenes were cringey and awkward,

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

The story is a musical drama and comedy that revolves around Chansonia, a music hall in Paris Faubourg. On New Year's Eve of 1935, the hall's manager, Pigoil, loses both his wife and his steady job when he discovers that she is cheating on him and leaving him for another man and the hall gets closed down when the owner commits suicide because he cannot pay his debts to the local mobster, Galapiat. Months later, our poor protagonist loses his beloved son Jojo as well when the child is given to his ex wife because Pigoil has no job and cannot support the child. This pushes Pigoil to get income by reclaiming Chansonia with the help of Jacky and Milou and the rest of the former employees of the hall. Galapiat decides to give them a month to prove that they can make the place profitable again. Meanwhile, a beautiful young woman named Douce crosses their path who is brought on as an announcer but ends up wowing the audience with her voice. She catches the attention of both Galapiat and Milou but instead of offering her heart to either one, she runs off to further her career by joining a more promising company. The Chansonia's reopening turns out to be a disaster and this, together with no word from his son despite his many letters, drives Pigoil to desperation and up a ladder from which he falls off.It's all so depressing but things get better (how could it possibly get any worse?) when the "Radio Man" who fears the outside world and only stays inside his house hears Douce's voice and realizes that she is the daughter of the woman he was in love with, the woman who used to be Chansonia's star whom he composed songs for. So he runs after Douche and convinces her to come back and with his new songs, make Chansonia grand again. Meanwhile, Pigoil has not died from the fall but only injured his foot. He goes home to find that his landlord was claiming all his possessions. He prays them spare his son's accordion and brings it to him. But Jojo is not home, so he just leaves it on the boy's bed, pausing to inhale his son's fragrance from the shirt on his bed. Much later, Jojo inadvertently discovers that his mother had been hiding his and his father's letters. Back home, Pigoil is roused from his furnitureless apartment by a serenade below his window - his beloved Jojo had come home to play him a tune on his accordion.The Chansonia rises from its ashes and they make enough money to buy it back, but things go awry with the Galapiat-Douche-Milou love triangle. Two innocent characters become victims of the crossfire. When Galapiat discovers that Douche and Milou are lovers, he sends his henchmen to kill Milou and steal his money, but they end up killing Jacky. When Milou runs after Galapiat for this, Pigoil trails after him and ends up killing Galapiat. He ends up behind bars. Ten years later, he is released and he walks towards a jam-packed Chansonia. He is about to ask the guard to tell the star, Jo Pigoil, that his father has arrived, but he changes his mind and tells the guard "nevermind, let him play" instead. He sits outside the music hall and listens to his boy making both their dreams come true for them. A somewhat sad yet still happy ending.It was a long movie with many subplots, but it was entertaining all throughout, despite the sadness. My favorite subplot was the main one about the father and son's great love for each other. It broke my heart to see Pigoil put Jojo's shirt to his face, like he really wanted to embrace his missing son, and my heart got so overwhelmed at the moment he crept back to the window when he realized that it was Jojo playing the accordion. I was also touched by the radio man's love for Rose. I shed tears for those scenes and a few more, but it was totally worth it. Tres magnifique! I am so watching more French films after this.

All of the professional media to which I have access panned PAR1S 36, ostensibly because it was not as glitzy as director Baz Luhrmann's 2001 musical, MOULIN ROUGE! (More likely these critics were too lazy to read subtitles, especially during a musical.) A more apt comparison would pair PAR1S 36 with the 1999 Tim Robbins musical, CRADLE WILL ROCK. After all, both movies feature the development of a production during the story (from which the movies take their titles), both stories are set in the 1930s, and both feature large casts of theater socialists fighting against a few powerful fascists (which, in the case of CRADLE WILL ROCK, included a young Nelson Rockefeller personally taking a sledgehammer to a Diego Rivera mural in the newly-finished Rockefeller Center, circa 1933). Though I rated CRADLE WILL ROCK and MOULIN ROUGE with "10's," as far as musicals go, I think PAR1S 36 is involving enough to merit a solid "8" rating.

Christophe Barratier found box office success in France in 2004 with his cute feel-good story The Chorus/Les choristes, which was about how a new music teacher brought humanity to a rural French reform school just after WWII by starting a boys' chorus. This also made newcomer Jean-Baptiste Maunier into a French teen icon. Faaubourg 36 is a glitzier, more musical (as in song-and-dance), more nostalgic period drama meant to evoke French films of the Thirties through its focus on a little working class Paris music hall called Chansonia. As the film opens, financial problems lead a mean magnate called Galapiat (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) to shut Chansonia down. But it's 1936, and in the spirit of socialist fervor (and universal labor-management strife) signaled by the rise of Leon Blum's Popular Front, the employees decide to take over Chansonia and run it themselves, on no money. This effort is spearheaded by the stage manager Germain Pigoil (Gerard Jugnot). Pigoil's life has filled with heartbreak. His dancer wife Viviane (Elisabeth Vitali) has left him and the state has chosen to take away his beloved accordionist son Jojo (Maxence Perrin) and send him to live with Viviane.Trying to create triumph out of adversity, Pigoil designates an awkward song-and-dance guy called Jacky Jacquet (Kad Merad) and a militant (and Jewish) leftist called Emile "Milou" Leibovich (Clovis Cornillac) to reopen the shuttered musical theater in uneasy cooperation with Galapiat. The show must go on! This seems a feeble prospect without financial backing, till the three men get lucky when a young newcomer nicknamed Douce (Nora Arnezedzer) turns up at tryouts. She's talented, pretty, and clearly a crowd-pleaser capable of selling tickets and keeping the place going. Her presence provides further insurance when the local boss turns out to like her.The ups and downs of the plot include depiction of the pervasive anti-Semitism of the extreme Right and the exacerbated hostilities between labor and ownership. There are little tragedies, but everything is softened and ends happily. Seekers of cinematic edge should look elsewhere. I found it hard to engage with the story, because it's too derivative, stereotypical, and diffuse. Production values are excellent and the music hall performances, if sometimes borderline cringe-worthy, carry through the period flavor. And there are some catchy tunes and sprightly stage turns as well.I saw this film when it was screened last summer at Saul Zaentz Studios in Berkeley by Tom Luddy, Co-Director of the Telluride Film Festival and the consensus of those then present seemed to be that 'Paris 36' (which has been picked up by Sony Pictures Classics) wasn't interesting or unusual enough to show at Telluride.But 'Paris 36' seems likely to do well with the more general US subtitles-film audience, and makes perfect sense as the "gala opening film" for the FSLC-UniFrance co-sponsored Rendez-Vous with French Cinema--though in my opinion last year's first night presentation, Claude Lelouch's 'Roman de Gare,' made a much more interesting opener.

Nora Arnezeder reminds me of movie stars of the thirties : beautiful, charming, she can sing, dance, act... Star quality ! As for the film itself, the story is rather simple, which I come to realize, is often what makes it good. It's not so much what the story is about but rather how you tell it. And in that case, you get to laugh, cry, you care about that Pigoil who looses his job, his wife and even his son and who doesn't loose hope, about Milou and Douce's love story. You'll love the great new songs, the homage to Busby Berkeley, Jacky's lousy jokes (a reprise of Kad's own TV skit) and secondary characters played by first-rate comedians like François Morel and the great Pierre Richard. What's not to like ?