Paris Revealed Read online

  ‘And is it all French stuff?’

  ‘No, but that doesn’t matter in Paris. For example, I pay 300 euros to get my hair cut and dyed—’

  I interrupt her with a gasp—not because she has admitted that she’s not a natural blonde, but because Parisians never usually reveal the price of anything expensive. It’s a sign that we’re getting into serious territory.

  ‘I go to a private apartment,’ she continues, ‘not some place on the street—you have to know where it is. And absolutely everyone goes there. It’s the hippest place in Paris. And the hairdresser is Australian.’

  ‘Australian?’ The man whom the hippest Parisiennes allow to cut their hair comes from the capital of canned beer, kangaroo poaching and burping?

  ‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter. Paris recognizes quality. It takes what is best from everywhere and makes it its own.’

  Like Chanel taking Karl Lagerfeld, and Dior taking Galliano. It’s what Susan was telling me. It all fits. This, then, seems to be the definition of Parisian style. It’s quite simply your choice of the best of everything. The choice will be slightly limited and conventional, but it’s the mix of ingredients that counts. It’s like a giant French salad bar—you can have what you want, but only if it’s in season. There’s no danger that anyone will expect Parisians to wear an airline pilot’s hat with a tutu and football boots. So they’ll always look and feel relaxed. It’s a great recipe for success—and anyone can do it.

  There’s only one more thing I need to know. As a middle-aged Parisian who doesn’t want to wear business suits, exactly what fragrance of air freshener should I be using in my toilet?

  ‘Just go to L’Éclaireur,’ she tells me, ‘and sniff. You can’t go wrong.’

  Shopping in a country where men wear slips

  The posh fashion stores in the 8th arrondissement will all have sales assistants who speak English, as well as the language of any country that is famous for sending wealthy visitors to Paris. Many cheaper stores in the city centre will also have English-speaking sales staff, especially if they’re fresh from school. But even if you’re forced to go native, buying clothes doesn’t have to be an intimidating linguistic experience. While the French naturally have plenty of their own words for fashion items (chemise, jupe, pantalon, haut, chaussures, sac à main, etc.), they also use a fair number of familiar English words.

  There are, however, a few grammatical and pronunciation guidelines that must be obeyed:

  1. Some clothing words look like English but aren’t. These ‘false friends’ include:

  robe, which is a dress, not a bathrobe

  veste - a jacket

  slip - a pair of underpants (male or female) rather than a ladies’ underskirt

  culotte - a general word for knickers, and not trousers that look like a skirt

  blouse - an overall rather a women’s shirt (that’s un chemisier)

  cravate - a normal tie, not something worn by Noel Coward

  costume - a men’s suit rather than fancy dress

  tissu, which is fabric and not something you sneeze into (while materiel means equipment rather than material)

  habit - an item of clothing rather than a routine

  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 th
e 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 the Eiffel Tower. Even a small shoot will involve an army of young people with walkie-talkies whose first job in the movies (at least one hopes it’s their first job) involves standing in the rain asking drivers to wait while a scene is shot.

  Amazingly, most Parisians accept this intrusion into their lifestyle almost meekly. Under normal circumstances, anyone not wearing a police uniform who was trying to get cars to stop would be ignored, insulted or hooted at, but a film shoot seems to expose a rare seam of patience in the city’s drivers. Waiting for a movie director to get his shot seems to be an acceptable reason for being stuck in traffic, on a par with a serious accident or bomb scare, and certainly much more tolerable than, say, a convoy of limousines taking world leaders to a conference.

  This tolerance is reflected in the city’s seat of power itself, the Hôtel de Ville. City Hall has a department called Mission Cinéma, created in 2002 by Mayor Bertrand Delanoë purely to protect Paris’s role in the movie business. It sponsors film festivals, gives subsidies to twenty or so small independent cinemas, and makes films happen. And it obviously does a very good job—at any given time there are ten movies being shot in Paris, in some 4,400 approved locations—and that’s only the official shoots.

  I went along to meet Mission Cinéma’s communications director, Sophie Boudon-Vanhille, to ask how she manages the city’s screen career.

  Her office was not at all what one might expect for the head of such a glamorous city’s film bureau. No corner bay window overlooking the Eiffel Tower, no anteroom staffed by the gardienne of an appointments diary as impenetrable as The Da Vinci Code’s cryptex. It was a DVD-filled, film-poster-covered, paper-piled working room on the ground floor of a municipal building that looked out over a bus route, made glamorous only by the number of framed photos of stars thanking Sophie and Mission Cinéma for their help.

  ‘Paris and cinema are intimement liés’, she told me, meaning the two are intimately connected, as if they were lovers.

  ‘But isn’t Paris just being used just for its looks?’ I suggested. ‘It has to put up with its already congested streets getting blocked, as well as the danger that it might become over-exposed.’

  ‘On the contrary’, Sophie said. ‘If a film producer wants the tax breaks given to French films, the shoot has to have a quota of French technicians, and this helps to keep the country’s cinema industry alive. It creates jobs for Parisians, who are cheaper to hire because they don’t need hotels.’

  This is true—whole areas of the city like Jourdain in the 19th and the nearby suburb of Montreuil are home to masses of intermittants du spectacle (‘occasional entertainment-industry workers’)—directors, actors, cameramen, light and sound engineers, electricians and who knows what, all being paid generous unemployment money between shows and film shoots, on permanent standby, like fighter pilots waiting to be sent on a life-and-death mission to save French culture.

  ‘We are also helping to raise the city’s profile,’ Sophie said. Well, what she actually talked about was le rayonnement de la ville, an expression that made Paris sound like a beacon. ‘Movies attract visitors, so we do everything we can to make it easy for producers to set their films here.’ As if to prove her point, a hubbub of activity erupts on the other side of the glass partition. It is, I am told, a production team asking for urgent permission to film.

  ‘Will they get the go-ahead?’ I ask, knowing how frustrating life can be in France if forms are not sent to offices well in advance.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Even if they want to film on the Champs-Élysées or outside the Louvre?’

  ‘It depends. If someone else is filming there on the dates they want, they are too late. There is no favouritism. It is first come, first served, even if they want to film in Montmartre or on the Pont des Arts.’

  And doesn’t it annoy her, I ask, that everyone seems to want the same clichéd shots?

  Far too diplomatic to answer directly, she tells me: ‘To take pressure off over-used locations, we send screenwriters on guided tours of lesser-known areas and suggest that these might inspire plotlines. For example, to Rungis food market or on a trip with the Seine river police.’

  This gives me a chance to quote some figures at her. On the excellent parisfilm.fr website, there is a long list of the fees charged to film at various types of location. It’s all very scientific. The city’s museums are divided into price categories—Musée 1 includes the Musée d’Art Moderne, the Carnavalet and the Petit Palais (4,000 euros a day* plus a crew fee—for example, 400 euros if there’s a crew of between eleven and twenty people); Musée 2 includes smaller museums like Victor Hugo’s and Balzac’s former homes and the Musée de la Vie Romantique (2,500 euros plus the same crew fee as a Musée 1); while other less glamorous locations such as the catacombs and public libraries cost 480 euros plus the standard crew fee.

  I ask Sophie about a couple of quirky charges. Apparently, it costs 400 euros to film by a canal, plus 40 to use a boat, and 62 for a bridge. Why 62?

  Sophie looks up the list on her computer, shakes her head and confesses she has no idea who thought up that particular euro-earner for the city.

  I have also noticed that some fees include royalties. So is Paris copyrighted? Can it charge a percentage of the box office for showing the Eiffel Tower?

  ‘No, no,’ Sophie says. ‘It costs nothing to film Paris other than an administration fee to organize things. The only buildings that charge royalties are the ones whose architect is still living. The Louvre pyramid, for example. That is an image that still belongs to I. M. Pei. If it’s in a film or a photo, he must get royalties.’

  ‘But before he built his pyramid, the Louvre was free?’

  ‘Yes.** And we don’t charge anything for small shoots. For fewer than ten people, a production needs no authorization, except a police certificate, which is free. And we give subsidies to young filmmakers to make courts métrages [short films]. We want young directors from the film schools to stay in Paris.’

  ‘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.