Adrian Tomine In Film: Shortcomings and Paris, 13th District

The illustrator and graphic novelist Adrian Tomine’s work is both ideal for adaptation and somewhat counter-intuitively resistant to it, as evidenced by a pair of very different movies inspired by his work, 2021’s Paris, 13th District and 2023’s Shortcomings. The former is an ensemble piece from Jacques Audiard, sometimes loosely inspired by a trilogy of otherwise unrelated Tomine short stories, while the latter is a collaboration between director Randall Park and Tomine himself, who maintains a great deal of fidelity to his original conception of this tale of representation and infidelity.

Adrian Tomine is a Japanese-American writer and artist who emerged as the boy genius of the thriving indie comics scene of the 1990s. He was still a teenager when he began publishing Optic Nerve as a series of semi-autobiographical mini-comics, often brief tales of young people grappling with alienation and romantic isolation. The stories drew comparisons to Raymond Carver and continued to evolve, both in their emotional complexity and certainly in the elegance of their draftsmanship. Tomine is probably best known to a broader audience as an illustrator for The New Yorker; his cover for the November 8, 2004 issue, in which a young man and a young woman sitting alone on opposite subway cars make eye contact as they pass one another, each reading the same book, is both a perfect encapsulation of Tomine’s emotional valence as well as one of the best New Yorker covers of this century. He also drew an inconic Weezer poster that was absolutely ubiquitous in college dorm rooms in the early 2000s.

The qualities that make his work well suited for adaptation are fairly obvious, even with a cursory read of any of his work since the late 1990s. Tomine crafts intimate, character-driven stories with careful attention to detail and gesture. His art style is a blend of meticulous composition and clean, elegant line work, with a specialty in rendering simple movements or facial expressions that render dialogue unnecessary. In that sense, it’s quite cinematic. If pressed for a hasty description of his long-running comic-book series Optic Nerve, it would be accurate if a little simplified to say that he makes indie movies on paper.

On the other hand, because both his art style and his storytelling approach is highly naturalistic, it gives filmmakers less to play with, the potentially fruitful challenge of finding a way to translate a more expressionistic style to film — say, the hyperbolic curves of Peter Bagge, the melancholy arcana of Seth, or the loving grotesquerie of Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Shortcomings and Paris, 13th District represent two entirely different approaches to adaptation. They’re both also quite good. But while Shortcomings thrives within the limitations of fidelity to the source material, Paris, 13th District works best when it breaks free.

Shortcomings is by far the mostly distinctively Tomine-esque, for one fairly obvious reason: He wrote the screenplay. It’s a highly faithful adaptation to his 2007 graphic novel of the same name, originally published as a series in Optic Nerve. It’s both a bitter romantic dramedy and an impressively thorny exploration of representation in art. Not only does Adrian Tomine hew closely to the source material, adding a few comic scenes mostly involving the supporting characters, but director Park attempts to mimic Tomine’s pen with his camera, retaining many of the original compositions in his framing and keeping said camera relatively static; though Tomine can certainly convey motion, his comic-book art is often defined by a sense of stillness and quiet.

The film opens with a sly feint. An impeccably dressed Stephanie Hsu (Everything Everywhere All At Once) clashes with an overtly racist desk clerk, only to reveal that her wealthy, tuxedo-clad husband (Daily Show co-host Ronny Chieng) has bought the building, and they are now the clerk’s bosses. Hsu and Chienge exchange smiley platitudes and kiss as the elevator doors close, presumably whisking them up to their luxury penthouse.

Cut to an audience, mostly all of them Asian-American, applauding this scene as it plays out before them on a big screen. It’s a clever if acerbic approximation of Crazy Rich Asians, one that Shortcomings’ protagonist Ben Takaka (Justin H. Min) does not appreciate. He argues about it afterward with his girlfriend Miko (Ally Maki), who has helped organize the screening as part of an Asian-American film festival. She and her friends acknowledge the movie’s glossy imperfections but are enthused about what the movie could herald for more representation in the culture — “That’s us up there!” — one of the film organizers gushes, but Ben isn’t having it. Just because there are Japanese or Chinese or Korean people in a movie doesn’t make it inherently good, and to suggest as much damns representational art — all art, really — with low expectations, he insists.

These are questions the movie will continuously circle back to, and increasingly uncomfortably as Miko accuses the aloof, curmudgeonly Ben of having a fetish for white girls. This tension ultimately explodes their relationship, which sees Ben trying to navigate romantic relationships with two different Caucasian women — a volatile, much-younger performance artist, Autumn, (Tavi Gevinson) and a sardonic graduate student, Sasha, (Debby Ryan) — with the help of his best friend, Alice (the comedian and actress Sherry Cola), a lesbian with a similarly wandering eye but a good bit more self-awareness than Ben.

Ben is struggling not just with his identity but the very concept of what identity does — or does not — mean for a Japanese American, which is only exacerbated when he learns that Miko is now in a relationship with a Japanese-obsessed white guy (the very funny Timothy Simons, who does seem to be in a slightly different movie than everyone else).

Shortcomings works so well because, for all of its direct socio-political concerns, it’s equally interested in the often contradictory nuances of these specific characters. It’s not a movie about an issue, it’s a movie about people whose lives are inextricably tangled up with this issue.

Paris, 13th District, Jacques Audiard’s adaptation of three shorter Adrian Tomine stories — “Hawaiian Getaway,” “Amber Sweet,” and “Killing and Dying” — is less distinctly a Adrian Tomine adaptation and more a Jacques Audiard movie, with a screenplay by Audiard along with Céline Sciamma and Léa Mysius. Which is tricky, given that Audiard himself is a genre-hopping director not easy to define. He’s perhaps best known — or most notoriously known, anyway — in American cinema for his dubious 2024 Oscar-nominated musical Emilia Pérez, but his French language films span a wide array of subjects and tones, from off-center crime flicks Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped (2005) to the top-notch prison gang drama A Prophet to the harrowing saga of immigration and family separation in Dheepan. He also directed the eccentric English-language Western comedy The Sisters Brothers.

Audiard seems to have little to no interest in drawing inspiration from Tomie’s aesthetic. Paris, 13th District operates not just in another spoken language, but an entirely different visual language. Audiard largely trades meticulous framing and composition for fluid movement. It’s hard to imagine the fastidious Adrian Tomine adopting any equivalent of a handheld camera, which in Audiard’s hands leans in, veers, in near constant, elegant motion. Audiard also shoots Paris, 13th District in sumptuous, high-gloss black and white.

The movie’s structure is sneakily brilliant, not so much in the deftness of the intersecting plot lines but the way the characters unfold in the second half after seeming so remote — both from each other and to the viewer — in the first hour.

There are two primary stories, drawn from “Hawaiian Getaway” and “Amber Sweet,” with “Killing and Dying” only briefly glanced as a minor subplot. In the first of those, Émile (Lucie Zhang), is surprised to find that the graduate student who answered her ad for a new roommate, Camille, (Makita Samba) is not only a man but an exceptionally attractive one. Émile is skeptical of the situation, but only briefly, before the two develop exactly the kind of passionate sexual relationship she feared would cause trouble. And, it does when the aloof Camille proves unsettlingly adept at dropping the benefits element of their roommates-with-benefits situation whenever it suits him.

In the second plotline, former real-estate agent Nora (Noémie Merlant) returns to college to start a new chapter in her life but finds herself deeply self-conscious among a student population a decade younger than her. That tension explodes when one of the male students mistakes her for a cam girl named Amber Sweet, inciting a wave of ugly harassment that only intensifies Nora’s insecurities. Out of both curiosity and desperation, she pays for a session with the real Amber Sweet (Jehnny Beth). The two develop a friendship, with Amber intuiting but not judging Nora’s deepest, darkest secret, and Nora in turn providing the kind of real human connection rare from online encounters, tawdry or otherwise. These personal revelations lead Nora to drop out of school and return to real estate, where she gets a job working for — guess who? — Camille.

It’s here that Paris, 13th District makes a surprising turn, not with a dramatic plot development, but a series of tiny revelations. In the context of his working relationship with Nora, Camille reveals himself to be more than just an unknowable, self-obsessed lothario. When Émile returns to the scene and the characters begin interacting in different configurations, they all begin to blossom ways that seemed nearly impossible in the first half, which is defined by loneliness and isolation. Thanks to a neat little magic trick from Audiard, you don’t even realize you’re watching a romantic comedy until the movie is moving toward its surprising, satisfying climax.

I’ve neglected to mention one thing about Paris, 13th District that must be noted: It is a deeply sexy movie. Not just because Zhang, Merlant, and Samba are all jaw-droppingly gorgeous, or because they all spend large swaths of the film nude, or because Jehnny Beth is playing an erotic fantasy made real. Certainly for those reasons, and also Audiard’s innate facility for languid eroticism.

This is hot movie about hot people having hot sex, even if the post-coital fallout sometimes upends their lives, and that is perhaps the way it deviates the furthest from the source material. Love and sex are certainly two of Tomine’s primary topics, but his stories are usually more about the lack of them. His characters are often defined by their longing and frustration. Audiard and his screenwriters did select two of the more sex-forward of Tomine’s stories (sex-positive seems a bit of a stretch), but the source material never tips into the full-blown eroticism of Paris, 13th District.

Shortcomings and Paris, 13th District each succeed on their own terms and represent two very different approaches to adaptation. Paris, 13th District is more purely cinematic, but the pluckier Shortcomings is perhaps the most impressive for its deft blend cultural critique and cynical yet humanistic character study. Anyone who deeply connects with Shortcomings’ darkly funny take on people both subsumed by self-awareness and curiously lacking in it has a treat in store for them: Adrian Tomine’s entire oeuvre is out there, waiting to be read.