We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  We had gathered for a rare screening of Jean Eustache’s La Maman et la putain (The Mother and the Whore), shot during the summer of 1972 and regarded by many as the New Wave’s last gasp, perhaps its apotheosis. It’s a ménage à trois involving a self-absorbed intellectual called Alexandre (Jean-Pierre Léaud, perfectly cast), his older girlfriend Marie (Bernadette Lafont) and a young Polish nurse, Veronika (Françoise Lebrun), a plotless three-anda-half hour epic exploring their private dilemma through a series of meandering scenes accompanied by long stretches of dialogue — the kind of cinema Hitchcock derided as “photographs of people talking”. It’s like life, in other words and, documentaries aside, there are few better depictions of how things were for many of us in the 1970s. For one thing (and this may seem absurd today) nobody seems to own any furniture — when not in bars or cafés or wandering around the boulevards, everybody hunkers down on the floor, or on mattresses or beanbags or cushions, until one minor character, played by the director himself, somehow acquires a wheelchair.

  Lafont, then in her early thirties, captures perfectly the pain and rage of a woman losing her lover to a younger rival. She came from Nîmes and had a raspy Arlesian accent, made raspier in her later years by drink and tobacco. Her screen debut at eighteen was in the sun-drenched seventeen-minute short Les Mistons, directed by Truffaut in 1958, and in the same year she appeared in Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, a gloomy low-budget melodrama widely regarded as initiating the nouvelle vague movement. She remained a wonderfully durable talent on stage and screen for more than half a century, usually playing tough, raucous, ballsy, independent women with sharp wits and a sharper tongue. There was something of the soixante-huitard veteran about her as she grew older. She had a watchful, sometimes predatory expression, pursed lips giving way to a wide smile, an explosive laugh. She was an absolutely terrible off-key singer and while she made her share of bad films she was always the best thing in them. My Pariscope said that she would be present at the screening, which explained the crowded lobby. French audiences adored her and so did I.

  She didn’t turn up. I can still hear the collective groan in the packed auditorium (which seated about a hundred) when the bad news was announced, but when the lights dimmed we all settled down and were soon enthralled. (On its release Le Figaro had denounced the film as“ an insult to the nation” and Télé 7 Jours called it a “monument of boredom and a Himalaya of pretension”. If that doesn’t snag your interest you won’t have read this far.) I think I may have glimpsed Lafont a few nights later, surrounded by friends in a queue outside another Latin Quarter cinema — the Saint-André-des-Arts — platinum-haired, wearing a bright Inca poncho and beret. But it might have been somebody else.

  The past, for me at least, is a foreign city, and a city that changes with every passing year. The mime school near Porte Saint-Martin closed down in 2005 and the building is now a flashy mid-range diner called Bristol Renaissance. Marcel Marceau died two years later. The Accatone closed in 2012 to be replaced by, of all things, “un espace d’information financière”. These days the nouvelle vague seems a rather blokeish enterprise, and is far less of the vital cultural force it once was. Auteur theory, which used to inform much serious thinking and writing about film, no longer has much traction. The movement’s directors grew older and in some cases sold out; critics and academics moved on. Smokers are now fewer in number and more furtive in behaviour. Bernadette Lafont died, aged seventy-four, in 2013.

  I recently watched La Maman et la putain at home on DVD. It’s the same film I saw at L’Accatone that wet November evening, but it’s not really the same film at all. How could it be? The past is a foreign city that changes year by year — we do things differently now. I glumly realise that I’ve been writing about my adult self as it was more than thirty years ago and I am therefore now, by any objective measure, old, or oldish, and certainly old enough to be the father of the film’s three characters, and its director, and with the perspective that time and age and disappointment bring. The French have a way of seeing the Biblical allocation of threescore years and ten as a week, each decade corresponding to a day, so if you’re in your mid-thirties, dear reader, you’re already on Thursday lunchtime. I’m on late Saturday afternoon and braced, more or less, for Le Dimanche de la vie (the title, as it happens, of a Raymond Queneau novel filmed in 1967, directed by Jean Herman and starring Danielle Darrieux). I shan’t be around much next week, but would like to see a movie on Monday. A matinee.

  Waiting for Godard

  Jeremy Allen

  The 1988 novel The Holy Innocents starts and ends at the Cinémathèque Française, during the tumultuous year of 1968. Along the way the story by the late Scottish novelist and film critic Gilbert Adair takes in the Langlois Affair, the May uprising, plenty of cinematic references (particularly nouvelle vague references), a Charles Trenet chanson played on repeat and three young people having an abundance of wayward sex together. Aside from the author’s nationality, the novel could hardly be more Parisian were it based on a Jean Cocteau novel made into a film by Jean-Pierre Melville, which of course it is.

  Les Enfants Terribles — the original novel by Cocteau (1929) and Melville’s faithful screen adaptation of the same name (1950) — is the cornerstone of The Holy Innocents. It’s a story that keeps being told, and with each telling mutates and becomes more sexually transgressive. Cocteau and Melville are both regarded as the fathers of the New Wave, and the former gave the latter his blessing by narrating the picture. The film was made with a meagre budget and starred Nicole Stéphane and Édouard Dermith as the star-crossed brother and sister — two beautiful, androgynous Jedwardians with exquisite cheekbones and curly blond quiffs. Their presence on the screen was a youthful antidote to what François Truffaut called the Cinéma de papa prevalent at the time, which the nouvelle vague would later attempt to wash away.

  The forbidden sexuality is always implicit in this 1950 adaptation, and unusually it takes the watchful gaze of some rosbifs from across the Channel to juice things up and consummate the relationship between the titular siblings: first in Ian McEwan’s novel The Cement Garden (1978), then Andrew Birkin’s 1994 film of the book starring his niece Charlotte Gainsbourg. Adair puts his own spin on the story by bringing in an American interloper and turning a taboo tryst into a reckless love triangle. It doesn’t quite end there either. Adair, troubled by the flaws he saw in The Holy Innocents, refused to allow it to be adapted into a film, at least until renowned Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci’s people got in touch with his agent. Adair readapted his own novel as The Dreamers (2003), which appeared the same year as the Bertolucci film of the same name, starring Eva Green, Louis Garrel and Michael Pitt. From the implicit idea of incestuous union in Cocteau’s original work, it becomes a three-way fuckfest in the hands of the Italian, as you might expect.

  The Cinémathèque Française obviously doesn’t feature in the original Cocteau work, given that it wasn’t set up until 1937 by the French archivist and cinéaste Henri Langlois, and Georges Franju, who later directed Les Yeux sans visage (1959). Cinephilia would have been a fledgling and very niche condition in 1929. Turning the leading characters into enfants de la Cinémathèque was Adair’s idea, and his attention to detail regarding the nouvelle vague tips over into Francophilia too. In the opening credits of the third Antoine Doinel film, Baisers volés (1968), Truffaut briefly shoots the scribbled note taped to the Cinémathèque window notifying patrons that the building is closed. The sign, though only in shot for seconds, inspires the conclusion of Adair’s The Dreamers, while the Charles Trenet song featured in Baisers volés, “Que reste-t-il de nos amours?”, is also the song that soundtracks the trio’s sequestered world away from the student insurrection on the streets (Bertolucci chose to use the better known “La Mer” in his version).

  The trio’s games involve re-enacting scenes from movies, and when they do venture outside of the house, they set out on a mission to create mischief, running through the halls of the Louvre
like the trio in Jean-Luc Godard’s Bande à part (1964). One assumes Bertolucci’s interest was initially piqued not only by the sex, but by the plot revolving around the sacking of Langlois. The Italian filmmaker became a disciple of Langlois’ when he lived in Paris during the late Sixties, as were Godard, Truffaut, Jacques Rivette, Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais. And so too the three central figures in The Dreamers. Without films to lose themselves in each day, the latter trio disappear into a demi-monde of sexual adventure to pass the time.

  The Cinémathèque Française now lives in a geometrically melty Frank Gehry building down by Bercy, but the residence was at the Palais de Chaillot in the sixteenth arrondissement back when Langlois was fired. Before moving into its permanent home, it swapped Parisian addresses a number of times, including downstairs at what is now the Palais de Tokyo, taking up residence there in the late Eighties and early Nineties when Jack Lang was culture secretary. In fact, if you keep your eyes peeled while wandering around the art gallery, you can still see some of the old calligraphy on the wall: letters appear to have been chiselled away while some remain, giving the remnant display the look of a job started then abandoned after someone thought better of it.

  The Palais de Tokyo is a ten-minute stroll from the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, where the French New Wave’s most universally recognisable scene took place. The black-and-white image of Jean Seberg wandering down the avenue with Jean-Paul Belmondo, selling American newspapers as she goes, has become representative of the whole nouvelle vague — at least in the Anglosphere — possibly because À bout de souffle (1960) is the only New Wave film many Brits and Americans have seen. The fact that the scene also features an American enunciating words that are recognisable without subtitles might also be a factor. “Do you know what my first words were?” asks Eva Green’s Isabelle in The Dreamers. “New York Herald Tribune!” she shouts, with the intonation rising as she imitates Seberg.

  Other scenes that have taken on a certain postcard virality include Jeanne Moreau in baggy jumper and chequered newsboy cap running across a bridge with Jules et Jim (1962), or Anna Karina and her co-stars dancing in Bande à part, famously inspiring the dance scene in Pulp Fiction (1994). The final shot of Antoine Doinel in Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents coups (1959) has also become well known thanks in the main to the many copycats it inspired. But no other shot is as synonymous with the French New Wave as Seberg and Belmondo sauntering nonchalantly along the Champs.

  And then there are those other things associated with Breathless: the jump cuts, the cross-referencing of other New Wave films, the obsession with American culture — particularly a fetishisation of Humphrey Bogart in Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep (1946) — the circular dialogue, the handheld camera, the Parisian mise-en-scène, the Breton top, the cigarette protruding from Belmondo’s lower lip, the driving around the city in a Peugeot 403… these are all present and correct and have become the hallmarks of the French New Wave, which can lead to disappointment when only a few of them show up in other movies.

  If Brits have an undisclosed inferiority complex regarding the French and France itself — a vague notion of suave uniformity — then the nouvelle vague compartmentalises the country into two categories: Paris and non-Paris. The city itself is the cynosure of everything important: chic, arty and worldly, and also a very dangerous place to be. Everything outside of Paris works differently. Ennui reigns, citizens are unreconstructed and family life dominates in the provinces, like in Roger Vadim’s Et Dieu… créa la femme (1956), where Brigitte Bardot — a sexually liberated and progressive youth, ergo: jeunesse dorée cruelly displaced in a parochial backwater — is demonised and punished for her wickedness. Paris is often juxtaposed with non-Paris to highlight how enlightened it is, and how backwards everywhere else is. In Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins (1959), Charles (Jean-Claude Brialy) is a naive country boy whose urbane cousin Paul introduces him to a world of libertines, beatniks, lesbians, card players, carousers and seducers. That things end in tears should come as little surprise to anyone but Charles himself.

  In Godard films, Paris is a place of alienation, possibly due to the amount of time the director spent growing up in Switzerland. Characters are often on the run from the capital, to escape the authorities (Le petit soldat, 1960) or the bourgeois lifestyle (Pierrot le Fou, 1965). Anna Karina plays a stripper in Une femme est une femme (1961) and a prostitute in Vivre sa vie (1962), though both are more symptomatic of Godard’s lack of trust in his wife than a desire to paint the city as a modern-day Babylon. In Alphaville (1965), he escapes Paris by transforming it into a futuristic dystopian landscape (that looks a bit like Paris in 1965). In Une femme est une femme (1961), Paris becomes the set of a musical, but the characters are too cosmopolitan to engage in such high jinks (there are a few songs performed a cappella), unlike the Norman working class in Jacques Demy’s mind-melting Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964), who are always singing in the streets as if life were a giant opera soundtracked by nouvelle vague compositeur du jour, Michel Legrand.

  Truffaut’s Les quatre cents coups, his first autobiographical Antoine Doinel film — which dramatises moments from his difficult childhood — portrays the ninth and eighteenth arrondissements as dingier and more undesirable than the postcard Paris projected in À bout de souffle. Varda was never afraid to shy away from gritty topics, in Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962) tackling an impending cancer diagnosis in real time, and her chef d’oeuvre, Le Bonheur (1968), exploring infidelity and suicide with the Île-de-France never looking so beautiful, but Paris always treacherous underneath. Éric Rohmer’s love affair with the city is at the other end of the scale: an idealised dreamscape of charming affairs and sporadic dialogue where strangers’ eyes meet in cafés or on buses and lead to meaningful, if fleeting, congress.

  The further away from Paris one goes — especially if it’s abroad — the more surreal everything becomes. Outside of France, the rules of the game are less easy to define. Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is wrought with psychogeographic symbolism, with Paris the sophisticated hub that binds the horrors of Hiroshima with Emmanuelle Riva’s naive childhood neverland of Nevers; while his landmark L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961) is a nonlinear Bohemian hinterland, suffused with enigmatic dialogue and gratuitous luxuriance (Blur’s “To The End” video from 1994 brilliantly recreates its peculiar ambience).

  If anything binds these films, it’s youth. The nouvelle vague unleashed a deluge of youthfulness; a celebration of the transience of juvenescence; less a wave, more a tsunami. By 1968, the New Wave was all but over, but there was enough residual energy to get Henri Langlois reinstated at the Cinémathèque Française. What’s more, the Langlois Affair is often looked upon as the catalyst for the events of May ‘68, a fitting dénouement for a French cinematic movement that ultimately changed the world.

  Paris Belongs to Us

  Elsa Court

  1.

  I grew up in Picardie, about an hour’s drive from Paris when traffic is good. From my childhood I remember our family’s yearly day trips to the capital, traditionally on 15 August, with a mixture of fondness and embarrassment. My father chose the date specifically because, with half the locals on holiday and most shops and museums closed in observance of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, it promised to be the ghostliest day in the year. As if animated by a desire to excavate historical Paris from the omnipresent assault of present day distractions and globally imported goods, Dad would drive from the Concorde to the Arc de Triomphe, past the myriad inactive boutiques of the Champs-Elysées, and play a CD recording of Charles de Gaulle’s Paris liberation speech, a speech in which, I couldn’t help notice, France is imagined as female, but Paris is masculine.

  Paris may well have been “abused” and “broken” (“outragé”, “martyrisé” in de Gaulle’s words) in the not so distant past of the Second World War, but it was, and still is, hard to understand how my father, who had turned eighteen only a few weeks after May ‘68, could have been so immu
ne to the spirit of his own generation that he had remained a fervent and unapologetic admirer of de Gaulle since his childhood years.

  Ironically, it was through the counterculture of his generation — more specifically the post-war filmmakers of the New Wave — that I developed my first alternative impressions of the city of Paris, long before I had a chance to explore the city on my own terms. My father shared, without knowing it, Godard’s contempt for the société de consommation and its omnipresent language, but he couldn’t have cared less about the self-fashioned radical cinema that a group of Hollywood-enamoured film critics started shooting in the streets of the capital in the late 1950s. He had a “certain idea of France”.

  Our annual Paris trip would usually culminate on the Île Saint-Louis, a quaint island in the middle of the Seine — and another postcard favourite — where, after we’d parked the car, we wandered almost alone, as if in the past. “Paris nous appartient,” my dad would say, triumphant, knowing he was borrowing the phrase from somewhere, but not thinking particularly of Jacques Rivette. For a long time, it felt like my Paris and my dad’s would never intersect. But eventually they did.

  2.

  In Agnès Varda’s New Wave classic Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Florence “Cléo” Victoire, a pre-yéyé pop singer played by Corrine Marchant, anxiously waits for the results of a biopsy which may reveal a diagnosis of cancer. Dread sends her on a journey of emancipation and self-discovery across the streets of Paris, from Rue de Rivoli to the Café du Dôme in Montparnasse, then from Vavin to the Salpêtrière hospital via the Parc Montsouris in the fourteenth arrondissement. It is 21 June, the longest day of the year.