For our post this week I chose a short film I found on Youtube. This film was titled “Just Friends” and was a quick story about a woman who finds out her childhood love is staying at a hotel in Paris. She employs her best friend to help her reach him, but this friend takes an unexpected approach to the favor.

As mentioned, this film was spoken in French and took place in Paris. Parisian culture was present. However, I find the plot to be the focus of the film. I immediately took note of the beginning of the main character catching a train. It made me think of how little Americans utilize the trains we have here. The trains the U.S. has even today, have limited routes. European trains are much more modern compared to ours and are intended to be used daily, both locally and long distance. The friend also took a taxi ride. While using a taxi service is being replaced with rideshare apps, this reminded me of American taxi culture before the apps were created.

The architecture of Paris is a large part of their culture that we got a preview of in this film. This included the buildings and streets. Buildings were clearly built long ago, and were very close to one another, as they were there before modern transportation. This leads to the roads, which were similar to cobblestone if not so. These roads were made for old forms of transportation, such as horse-drawn carriages. This led me to compare it to older architecture I have seen. What comes to mind for me is Philadelphia, which is loaded with cobblestone roads and tightly packed buildings.

Something unique about Parisians is their large smoking culture. I knew of this prior to the film, and this is not in a positive or negative tone. Regardless of the American opinion we may have on smoking, over there it is quite a cultural norm. As just noted, in the U.S., we have grown to discourage smoking cigarettes. However, e-cigarettes and vaporizers are on the rise. I find this difference to also show similarity, as nicotine is still being consumed just in different forms.

I found the people in the film around the main characters were participating in some leisurely walking or enjoying a bite at a cafe. Otherwise, there was not much show of their daily lives. The relationship between the main character and her friend, Elsa, expressed some values they developed within their culture. For example, when the friend agrees to go into the hotel for the main character, the main character says “I will name my daughter Elsa!” This shows how a positive friend dynamic can become almost familial. Also, the main character being shocked and distressed that Elsa lied to her towards the end, allows us to see how important their friendship was to her. While friendship is valued across cultures, seeing it expressed here in another language, just shows how global love is.

Topics like economics, politics, food, and more are hard to touch on in something like this short film. Even the weather was neutral, and just cloudy at most. Regardless, I found this to be a lively preview into a quirky Perisian woman’s life, and some of her culture as well.