“I have to say, up until this moment, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to do this,” said TIFF documentary programmer Thom Powers in his introduction of Paris, Not France, undoubtedly referencing the hullabaloo that sprung up over the past few weeks when the film’s four planned festival screenings were reduced to one amidst rumors of possible legal action from the Hilton camp. But if Paris Hilton (or anyone on her payroll) is suing Adria Petty (or anyone on her payroll) because of this film, she is a) insane, and b) so fiercely committed to putting on a pretty face for the camera that she’ll actually a walk a red carpet in support of a film which she allegedly doesn’t want you to see.
Yes, Paris was in the building tonight. As soon as the emergency exit door at stage left popped open, someone in the audience cried, “Paris!” and a hush fell over the crowd. The 800 or so ticket holders at the Ryerson watched in virtual silence as Paris––head down, face blank––allowed herself to be led by boyfriend Benji Madden to their reserved seats. And then the snapping started. Cellphones, point and clicks, professional cameras—it seemed like everyone had one, and everyone stood up to train it on the rail-thin blonde, panopticon-style. The snapping just went on and on until Powers took the stage and cracked, “Don’t you want to take a picture of me?” (As I write this, an hour after the screening let out, images of Paris on tonight’s red carpet have already hit the wires.)
In the lobby after the screening, a gang of journalists clustered together, and somebody threw out a phrase that seemed to float above the room and immediately etch itself larger-than-life in granite as the shortcut to Paris, Not France’s dismissal: “It’s a love letter.” That’s certainly one way to look at it. Another, is that if this is a film about Paris Hilton at all, whether loving or otherwise, then it’s a failure, because it so convinces that there is no Paris Hilton, only “Paris Hilton”––a brand designed to sell watches and perfume who has assumed the now-empty shell of the once-vivacious party girl. Though the director tries to sell the idea that her subject is a self-marketing whiz who calculatingly hides her real self behind a cover that is deliberately without content in order to make for smoother mass consumption, neither the film nor its star ever convinces that there’s a significantly more substantial real self to hide. But! If Paris is merely using the heiress as an in to talk about the cold, mechanical efficiency of today’s celebrity culture, to give the consumers of surface-as-depth media (that means you, and you, and of course, me) a demystified glimpse at the way our US Weekly is made, at the Invasion of the Body Snatchers-like process by which human beings are used as vessels to fill an unquenchable thirst on the part of the masses for yet more media about we which we just don’t have to think…well, that would really be something.
