Daguerréotypes

This film made me nostalgic for a community I wasn’t born early enough to join, in a culture I wasn’t born into. An era and a place I’ve seen just through a foggy window. Having spent a couple of months in Burgundy - not Paris - I couldn’t help but personalize the film. While I knew the town where I lived and worked was small and rural, I didn’t exactly realize just how out of time it was. I immediately identified the gossiping older ladies with my knitting group pals, the bricabrac perfumery with the insanely cramped hardware/guns/kitchen gadgetry/more shop run by a curmudgeonly family.  It is revealed that most of the residents are not Parisian. Rather, they’re from provincial France. Despite the romanticization of this Parisian street, the sympathetic and frank subjects, “simple country folk” perhaps, have warped it into a village unto itself. It’s no longer Paris - it’s Charolles or a village in Sarthe, nestled amongst the vineyards. To a foreigner, it bashes any preconceptions of a Parisian or a Frenchman squarely in the face. This isn’t Paris, this is France.