I'm Hungry, I'm Cold

MOVIE #2,151 • SCORE 9/10 • 11.21.24
SERIES: ALBERT & AKERMAN

I’m Hungry, I’m Cold (it sounds more important in the original French: “J'ai faim, j'ai froid”) is the opening 12-minute segment of a six-film anthology called Paris seen by… 20 years later, which is a follow-up of sorts to 1965’s collective Paris seen by… (duh) featuring Godard and Rohmer, among others. The focus is on specific places in the city, but Akerman — forever the outsider — is the only filmmaker in either entry to not focus their short on a single, specific place (every other title is named after a neighborhood or street, in fact). It stars Maria de Medeiros whose line read of “I don’t have a pot” (pot belly) in Pulp Fiction is forever burned in my brain…


(Some people remember this scene for the “make spoons” line, but not I.)

This almost feels like a send-up or parody of the ‘young girl moves to the big city’ trope. They constantly repeat how cold and how hungry they are but then easily get food (they dine and dash at a cafe, and steal a big sandwich from a vendor without consequence) and end the night in a man's warm flat where one of them makes yet another free meal as the other loses her virginity. Everything, even that major life event, is casual and fleeting. Shelter, food and sex (love? more on this later) are all rendered as uncomplicated as breathing, as inconsequential as simply existing in the world. There's much to glean about Akerman’s worldview in these twelve minutes. Life is utterly vast and complicated, the only way to survive is to tackle it with complete indifference.

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CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ MOVIE #2,150 - (YOU ARE HERE) - MOVIE #2,152 ⫸

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Two girls came to Paris for the first time and they are trying to live. It was released on July 7, 1984.