'Life of Pi' Paris premiere audience in lifeboats, in a swimming pool

Oh the je ne sais quoi of the French, at least when it comes to a weirdly wonderful film screening in Paris on Wednesday of Ang Lee’s watery Life of Pi.

Audience members were literally immersed in the spirit of the movie — about a young Indian man shipwrecked in the ocean with a Bengal tiger — by watching the film, in 3-D, from lifeboats in Paris’ Piscine Pailleron indoor swimming pool.

Check out more photos from the event — itself reminiscent of a sweetly quirky French New Wave film — below, plus a video set to tunes by Sigur Ros and Coldplay on how the ambitious premiere was pulled off, from boats being pushed into the pool to a red carpet rolled out next to the pool to fashionable Parisian audience members brightly proclaiming “magnifique!”

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