‘And can anyone make any kind of film they want?’ I ask. ‘For example, if someone wants to make a movie mocking Napoleon or Charles de Gaulle, will they get permission?’
As this has long been a personal ambition of mine, I hold my breath while she smiles at the idea.
‘Yes, of course,’ she finally says. ‘We are not a censorship bureau. All we ask is that the filming won’t shock the public or be dangerous.’
It’s all very impressive, a perfect combination of Paris’s love of cinema and its hard head for business. I’m sure every Hollywood actor and actress would love to have a manager as feisty as Mission Cinéma.
Paris on screen
So many films have been shot in Paris that everyone will have a different favourite. Most movie buffs will mention A Bout de Souffle (Breathless), which I love and disapprove of at the same time. It is fresh, daring and (yes) breathless, but I must confess I get annoyed at seeing Belmondo spend so much of his time smoking in bed. No wonder he’s breathless.
They will also rave about Hôtel du Nord, the 1938 classic in which two suicidal lovers, who are staying at the aforementioned hostelry on the Canal Saint-Martin, meet a prostitute played by the inimitable (or rather, highly imitable) Arletty. She was a film version of Édith Piaf, an actress with an incredible Parisian accent. The film contains wonderful pieces of dialogue—one of the lovers laments, ‘Ma vie n’est pas une existence,’ to which the other replies, ‘Tu crois que mon existence est une vie?’ It’s a piece of repartee so Parisian and philosophical that it’s almost meaningless. The only trouble with Hôtel du Nord, though, is that it wasn’t made in Paris—it was almost entirely shot on a studio set, an exact replica of the canalside.
So much for the obvious classics—the following are my own two favourite Paris films. Neither of them is very well known outside France, but each is quintessentially Parisian in its own way.
The first is the shortest and most graphic. And it certainly wouldn’t get made today—even back in the liberal 1970s its director Claude Lelouch was arrested after the first public screening. It’s C’était un Rendez-vous (which could be translated as It Was a Date), a nine-minute adrenalin rush that was filmed with a single camera in real time.
It is simply footage of Lelouch’s Mercedes being driven by the director himself through the streets of Paris at five-thirty one August morning in 1976. He speeds through red lights, mounts the pavement, crosses on to the wrong side of the road to overtake, taking his camera on a manic tour of Paris from the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-Élysées, past the Opéra and Pigalle, and ending up at the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre to make the rendez-vous in the title—with a blonde babe.
Lelouch shot the film without permission, driving through real traffic with a camera strapped to his front bumper, adding nothing but a soundtrack of squealing tyres and a Ferrari engine that growls like a frustrated lion every time it has to slow down.
And it’s not only the driving style that is typically Parisian. The film gives a perfect example of how drivers behave at the Étoile roundabout, even at legal speeds—that is, go exactly where you want to and don’t give a damn what other people are doing. The movie also pays tribute to the city’s cleanliness—almost the only vehicles about are refuse lorries.
And then there’s the conclusion. A Parisian male can’t just drive through Paris for the hell of it (or can’t admit that’s what he was doing)—it has to be to meet a femme. Personally, I enjoy the film for its views of 1970s Paris and its sheer Parisian-ness. The streets are almost empty, especially out in the posh areas around the Arc de Triomphe, because Lelouch made his film in August. It’s a testimony to how many Parisians desert the city during that month—and to how bored a Parisian can become if he’s forced to stay at home.
Favourite number two is a film called Le Grand Blond avec une Chaussure Noire—The Tall Blond with One Black Shoe. It’s a comedy made in 1972 starring Pierre Richard, a sort of French Charlie Chaplin of his day—an actor with a gift for slapstick and a poignant edge, who almost always plays the same character, a curly-haired, accident-prone seducer.
Le Grand Blond is a romping spoof of a spy movie with lots of street scenes and a highly Parisian plot. The two rivals for control of the French secret service are battling it out in a dirty chien eat chien war. To distract the pretender, the current head of the Sureté orders his men to go to Orly airport and choose a total innocent with whom they will ‘make contact’, thereby suggesting to their rivals that this is a master spy. The victim is a hapless classical violinist (Pierre Richard), the kind of social inadequate who wears odd shoes and doesn’t realize that he’s being followed by secret-service agents, even when they start shooting at each other.
What is so typically Parisian about that, one might ask? Well, he may be a misfit, but the violinist is having an affair with his best friend’s wife (bien sûr), and when a femme fatale is sent to seduce him into revealing his (non-existent) secrets, he is so good in bed that she falls in love with him. Every Parisian male’s ideal Parisian. Furthermore, the femme fatale’s dress is a Guy Laroche creation that is 1970s Paris personified—from the front it looks like a long, formal evening gown, but when she turns around, she reveals a décolleté that swoops down to expose a good inch
