baskets - training shoes rather than something to collect strawberries in or throw basketballs at, and
talon - a heel, and nothing to do with an eagle’s claws.
2. Other words have been slightly adjusted for French use, and should be treated with caution: un jean is a pair of jeans, just as un short is a pair of shorts and un bermuda is a pair of long shorts. Basically, anything with two leg holes is singular in French. This also explains why une culotte is a pair of knickers, and un caleçon a pair of boxer shorts. Similarly, un collant is a pair of tights, while a pair of stockings, which are not joined at the gusset, is plural—des bas.
3. Generally, to be understood, it is necessary to pronounce all relevant English words with as stereotypical a French accent as you can muster, putting the stress on the second syllable as though you were angry with the item of clothing you are talking about. So …
Un T-shirt is ‘un tee-SHARRRT’.
Des baskets are ‘day basss-KETT’.
Où est le sportswear? is ‘Oo-ay le sporrtss-WHERE?’
Having just one syllable, a small size is simply ‘un SMOLL’. But if you want something in a medium you must ask for ‘un may-d’YUM’ and a large is ‘un larr-djj’.
Appropriately, shopping itself follows the ‘angry second syllable’ rule—it’s ‘le sho-PING’.
* For more details see my book 1,000 Years of Annoying the French.
** This is something I have long said. See my book Talk to the Snail for an explanation of how it’s often the customers who are to blame for bad service.
To encourage film shoots, Paris will lend or hire out almost any part of the city—including, apparently, First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, here filming with Woody Allen in 2010.
10
CINEMA
Quand les Américains tournent un film, ils visent le monde entier. Quand les Français le font, ils visent Paris.
(When the Americans shoot films, they aim at the whole planet. When the French do it, they aim at Paris.)
JEAN-JACQUES ANNAUD, FILM
DIRECTOR
Ciné qua non
PARISIANS LOVE film. The city is overflowing with cinemas. Almost every major métro junction has them—Bastille, Les Halles, Opéra, Odéon, Stalingrad, Montparnasse, place de Clichy. According to the events guide Pariscope, the city has seventy-seven cinemas—more, in fact, because some, at Opéra and on the Champs-Élysées for example, have not just several screens but also several annexes in different buildings. This means that on average (and admittedly averages are dangerous things) there is about one cinema per square kilometre in the city. In the Latin Quarter it feels more like one per square metre. And they all seem to be flourishing. When a big new film comes out—French or foreign—there are long queues and full houses everywhere. Major foreign releases will be shown in most cinemas in VO (version originale), not just for ex-pats but because Parisians don’t mind at all if they have to read subtitles. And in the studenty Latin Quarter there are still several tiny independent cinemas where, for slightly more than the price of the DVD, you can sit and watch a low-definition copy of a classic movie while causing yourself chronic back pain on the ancient seats.
Paris is so cinéphile that I have even seen sexy young women wearing Woody Allen T-shirts. Of course, they might have been friends of his wife, but even so, Woody probably doesn’t get that kind of treatment in any other city.
And the relationship between Paris and cinema is very much a mutual love affair. The city is one of the movie industry’s most bankable stars—it’s an actor (or actress, perhaps) with eternal appeal. And make no mistake, Paris knows this very well. The city may look effortlessly elegant when it appears on screen, but behind the scenes it is constantly promoting the movie career of its streets and monuments, making sure it gets its name up in lights and its face in front of the camera at every occasion.
Mission possible
Any film shot in Paris has an instant added ingredient. Having the city as the backdrop to your screenplay is like serving Champagne at dinner—it becomes an event.
At its best, Paris looks sensational (parts of it have, after all, been rather well designed), and a few landscape shots of the City of Light in your movie are sure to bring a touch of class and glamour where there was none before. The Devil Wears Prada, for example, used the Petit Palais, the Pont des Arts and the fountains of Concorde to make its characters look chic. If the producers had wanted realism, they could have filmed the Paris Fashion Week section of the story in traffic jams on faceless boulevards, where visiting fashion journalists spend a fair amount of their time. But that’s not why producers send their actors to Paris.
Similarly, The Da Vinci Code was a real gift to both Paris and the producers. The movie used fairly accurate studio mock-ups of the interior of the Louvre, as well as classy shots of the real museum, the Palais-Royal and Saint-Sulpice church. And ever since the Dan Brown phenomenon began, visitors to the city have been able to take guided tours of the book/movie locations.
This has created problems for real Parisians. A friend of mine who was living near Saint-Sulpice quite reasonably wanted to get married there. However, her bridegroom-to-be had the misfortune of being English, so the parish priest sat them down for a long interrogation scene, grilling them not only about their opinion of the sanctity of marriage and whether their future children would be Catholics, but also to make sure that they didn’t want to get married at Saint-Sulpice just so that the guests could start digging up the aisle in search of cryptic messages.
And Parisians suffer smaller inconveniences every time a big movie shoot comes to the city—a whole neighbourhood can be blocked off by catering vans, make-up trailers and trucks that seem to contain enough lengths of cable to run an extension lead to the tip of
