We'll Never Have Paris

by Andrew Gallix

  One of the films I have watched is Chris Marker’s 1962 La Jetée. The film begins with the screeching of aircraft engines and then pans over a photo of Orly airport’s long, peninsular viewing platform. The mechanical roar fades, replaced by the choir of the Russian Orthodox Cathedral of St Alexander Nevsky chanting a piece for Holy Saturday, the one day when Christ is dead, not yet resurrected. “This is the story of a man,” a voice (Jean Négroni, tar and sawdust) tells us, “marked by an image from his childhood”. As a child, taken by his parents one Sunday to see the planes arriving and leaving, our protagonist sees a “crumpling body” and hears “the cries of the crowd”: a man dying, or rather, being killed. He remembers this day, this scene, intensely, and most significantly “the frozen sun, the setting at the end of the jetty, and a woman’s face”.

  More stuff happens after that (Paris, along with most of humanity, is completely destroyed in a massive nuclear war, for example), but it is that woman’s face at the end of the jetty he remembers, and so do I.

  When I arrived in Paris that second time I did not quite go, I had been expecting something similar. Not a crumpling body, nor anguished cries, and maybe not at the end of a jetty, more probably in a bland arrivals lounge, but a woman with her camera and her fringe, standing there amidst the crowd of taxi-hustlers, conference hosts and other expectant lovers. To be thus met on arrival at a harbour, station or airport is one of life’s deep momentary joys.

  I scanned the ranked faces, each briefly eyeing me in return. I saw a tall woman with brown, sun-faded hair, but when she removed her dark glasses, she was not the one I sought. Another stood with her back to me and I was sure I recognised her shoulders, so I tapped her, and she turned with disdain. A third had the same jacket and my hopes rose, but then she opened her arms to swoop in embrace on a small and startled child. After nearly an hour, I knew something was wrong.

  And then, a series of texts awoke my phone. Have you arrived yet? Where are you? I’m here, but I can’t see you.

  I wondered if we had become invisible to one another, if we were ghosts, slipped out of each other’s time streams. But it was not that.

  It seems stupid now, of course, but back then I did not realise there was more than one airport in Paris.

  Another film I have watched is Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1976). This film begins with a long sequence set in the arrivals terminal of Orly airport. Two nuns pass by, whether arriving, welcoming or departing, I do not know. We also see a nurse with a baby, a woman with a black hat, a woman with a luggage trolley, a man with an overcoat, a man with a violin case, a man with a raincoat and a man wearing a turban and flip-flops. Then come two older women, a man holding flowers, a priest, and a porter. We see a group of American tourists (well-hatted Midwestern matriarchs), the “President” (of the Republic? I am never sure), a military officer, a group of schoolgirls, a man with a camera, an impressively well-dressed couple, a gaggle of flight attendants, another military man clutching a gift (possibly for the President), a woman in fur with “nothing to declare”.

  “I want to write about Chris Marker and Jacques Tati, La Jetée and Playtime,” I told M, a film scholar. M looked at me sceptically.

  “They’re tonally very different, those films,” she warned. Playtime is a high-profile, high-budget comedy, two hours long, a rich satire of modernity replete with a vast cast, an intricate mise en scène, thousands of sight gags and deft use of colour, though almost no dialogue and nothing much in the way of a plot. La Jetée lasts a scarce twenty-eight minutes and consists almost entirely of a sequence of black-and-white photographs over which a single voice reads a complex story. Playtime is in constant motion, endlessly dizzying in its kinetic choreography; La Jetée, when it moves at all, moves so slowly its movement is scarcely perceptible. Playtime is circadian (the action, such as it is, takes place over one day, more or less); La Jetée extends until the end of knowable human time, and reaches back beyond its beginnings. Playtime posits modernity, futurity and technology as glitch-ridden, subject to human error, and worthy of endless satire, yet striving for seamless efficiency and at work for the benevolence of humanity. In La Jetée, present and future technology is relentlessly barbarous, a force for nothing more than utter and complete human subjugation. Playtime is by world-renowned French director Tati, and features the iconic Monsieur Hulot, a synecdoche of a certain strain of Gallicism. La Jetée is by the pseudonymous, rarely-pictured, unknowable Marker.

  There are two main airports in Paris, and I was at the wrong one. I called the girl who had been waiting for me, but was told about prohibitive roaming charges, and was instead texted some garbled instructions as to how to get into the city, to a place where we could meet.

  The rank outside was cluttered, hectic. I did not understand the difference between the various train and bus lines, the signs indicating directions and place names I did not know, but eventually I found a bus which promised to deliver me safely to our hastily-arranged meeting point. The bus took its time, meandering through dull suburbs. It was Sunday. There were works, a road closure, a protest probably. At somewhere called Joinville-le-Pont, just outside the Bois de Vincennes, the bus stopped. The driver got off. I sat there, contemplating the failing battery on my phone.

  M was not wrong about the films, and yet: both circle around Orly airport, the place where I had erroneously landed. La Jetée opens and closes there, in some sense stays there forever, our protagonist stuck in an eternal memory loop. In the opening sequence of Playtime, Hulot arrives along with all the others, but only after a couple of false starts: we see a tall man, raincoat, umbrella, hat, but it is not him, a case of mistaken identity. He appears later, from an overcrowded bus, accidentally, almost surreptitiously, as if by mistake. He is wrong in this world, all gangling angles and mishaps, too human amidst the plate glass and shining steel. Like the man in La Jetée, Hulot seems to have come from the past into a present version of the future. Half of him is here, the other half is in the past. (“I remember you from the war!” shouts one of his chance encounters, but whether this is true, or yet another false memory and mistaken identity, we do not know.)

  It is at the airport where Hulot, too, spots a woman, one of the American tourists, but an anomalous one, one who stands out from the crowd. He spends the rest of the film trying to meet her again, only to fail. He tries to photograph her, to imprint her memory, but cannot, ending up instead sending her a gift which she will receive, but whose donor she will never know.

  Both of these films are about trying to capture the unreachable. Both of these films deal with a man, faintly lost, ever in transit, and an evanescent woman. These films hinge each other, like images reflected in glass swing doors. They are almost contemporaries: Playtime began filming in 1964, a mere two years after La Jetée came out. And, despite their settings, neither film goes to Paris. The Paris of La Jetée is either a memory or has been obliterated, and Playtime was not filmed at Orly.

  Troubled by intrusive flares and gleams from the steel and plate glass, and disappointed by the impossibility of halting all air traffic to and from the airport during filming (the very traffic Marker uses the sound of), Tati built his own Paris. “Tativille” was a vast Potemkin city, a facsimile Paris, not only with its own concrete buildings, tarmacked streets and functional traffic lights, but also a number of huge trompe l’oeil facades. The scenes at Orly are stage sets with backdrops made entirely of giant blow-ups of the airport. The images reflecting in the endlessly swinging plate glass doors of Playtime (the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the Champs Elysées) are photographs. Playtime takes place in a replica, a city of maquettes and projections, one more like the city it needed to be. La Jetée is a film which is in Paris, but a Paris which does not exist: the city is destroyed then recreated through memory. Both are constructed from photographs. Despite the fortune spent on its construction, Tativille (like La Jetée’s Paris) has been all but obliterated. What little is left now sits beneath the A4 autoroute, just to the south-eas
t of the capital, near Joinville-le-Pont and the Bois de Vincennes.

  Another driver eventually appeared, or maybe it was the same one back, I could not be sure. The bus started up again and grumbled its way into the city, eventually stopping to disgorge all passengers and their bags at Les Invalides. I let her know where I was and received the words quartier de merde texted back to me, as well as the number of a Métro line and station. I headed underground.

  Filming on Playtime was held up by technical problems and, more frequently, money running out. It took so long that many extras dropped out, frustrated by the slow hours and eventual lack of pay. (Barbara Dennek, the woman who plays Hulot’s object of desire had planned a career in film, but after her experience on set with Playtime, never made a film again. Hélène Châtelain, the analogous actor from La Jetée, went on to have a long and varied career, but never made another film either.) Tati used the same solution for an absent city and absent actors: life-sized photographs. In the crowd scenes in Playtime, many of the bystanders are photographs, strategically placed among the living.

  The endless white-tiled tunnels of the Métro reminded me of nothing so much as the urinals in British Victorian pubs. I admired their cleanliness, the way they reflected light and sound. I wandered. I took my time. I got lost.

  1961, a bright Sunday in late September. Families take their children to the new airport. It is an afternoon out. Crowds gather and scuttle as jet engines roar. The singer Gilbert Bécaud sits in the café and has an idea for a song. “Dimanche à Orly”, he will sing two years later: the tale of a man who lives with his parents in a comfortable nearby flat but sees the planes leaving and dreams of a different life. (And twenty-five years after that, Jacques Brel will reference Bécaud in his own attempt to sing down his imminent mortality, a vision of lovers endlessly meeting or separating, “Orly”.)

  A man with a battered leather jacket and closely-cropped hair, the look of a traveller or a former soldier, the look of a man who has seen things, takes a Nikon F, the best camera he’s been able to get hold of through one of his journalist contacts, and organises a small group of his friends, including a man who looks vaguely like himself and a girl with hair which tousles in the wind here, and takes pictures of them, but not portraits. No one smiles in these pictures. As they pass through the arrivals hall and the departure lounge then head out onto the viewing platform, he notices another man studiously taking pictures. This man, taller and more confident, well-dressed in a light grey cotton suit, crisp white shirt and narrow green tie, slips a Focaflex (the latest model, slimline, discreet, beautifully designed) out of and into the pocket of his jacket. The first man sees that the other is taking long shots of the new buildings and the crowds, but not the planes. The tall man snaps people arriving, but also the rubbish bins, the door handles, the stair rails. The two men notice each other, think they may recognise each other (from the war, perhaps?) but make no acknowledgement other than a scarce nod of the head, the taller man apparently not wanting to be recognised, then move on.

  If you watch La Jetée, the scene on the jetty, at about three minutes in, and look carefully, you can see Jacques Tati in the crowd on the jetty. If you watch Playtime, look carefully at the crowds in the opening scenes, and freeze the frame, you can see a life-sized blow-up photograph of Chris Marker.

  I cannot remember when I came up out of the Métro. I would like to think it was on one of those faded olive staircases, with Belle Epoque signs guiding me to meet a girl drinking unfeasibly strong coffee in a pavement café, but I seem to think it was a ripe cement stairwell in a rather bland suburb. It matters little, because I have also been there, in that not-Paris of getting lost and endlessly circulating, looking for something that probably does not exist, in the same way that both films are stuck in their loops of time and place and memory. Playtime was supposed to end with Hulot escaping, walking out from the screen, as literally as possible, projected in ombre chinoise around the auditorium. The idea was dropped due to its technical impossibility and the film instead ends with gridlocked traffic endlessly circling a roundabout. La Jetée ends with its beginning.

  I still hope to return one day, in the middle of a warm Sunday afternoon, and find the sky and the glass and the clouds, and someone waiting at the end of the pier, but it has not yet happened. The last time I did not go to Paris it seemed I, too, had been marked by an image from my past. I was returning from a conference in Angers and had to change trains. I had had a couple of beers, was tired and running late. Unsure how long the queue for the Eurostar would be and no longer caring, I unzipped and took a piss, just behind the entrance to the Gare du Nord.

  Props

  Laura Waddell

  The spaghetti Alexandre is eating gets right up from the plate and slaps him hard in the face. Individual gelatinous strands ricochet in a backwards bend, flinging pinprick droplets of orange sauce up the wall behind. Like a colony of ladybugs they creep slowly down to the carpet where they will seep into the wool. The soil of a plant shoots from its plastic pot; a confetti cannon of clumps and grains, some hitting leaves on their way up and ending elevation then and there; most reaching the ceiling before bouncing back and raining down over the tiled hearth. A pink balloon pops. The neighbour’s parrot squawks.

  Again?

  The dust brush Nina uses to collect the soil and re-pot it for the next scene is already matted with glitter and hair. The next balloon from the packet is blue, but the colour doesn’t matter for a one-take shot as long as it’s not green. This balloon bursts too when it is only half blown. The next one is pink again, and she bobs it by the string into place.

  The salt and pepper shakers are placed on the table again. All set. Break for lunch. “Spaghetti?” someone offers Alexandre. Everyone laughs. Alexandre laughs loudest of all with very white, straight teeth.

  Nina sits in her prop van with the door open and spoons rice from a paper plate into her mouth. The plate is biode- gradable. It can go anywhere, which is just as well. There are no recycling facilities on set, only constantly replaced black garbage bags filled with plastic forks, tissues, and bits of electrical tape. At the end of today there will also be a lot of used spaghetti.

  A runner walks by, two hands out in front filled with a clutch of bright plastic straws. “No, Matthew, we’re not doing the straws anymore. They’re out. You were in that meeting.” He about turns in response to the disembodied order. Straws hit the inside of a bag in a dull, muffled downpour.

  Nina closes the door of the trailer without turning on the light. At one end of the cabin there are rails of clothes. Modern casual to match the customer profile of newly launching, supermarché own-brand Strike Sauces, bagged and tagged for each ad segment which will run in the gaps between next season’s cable network hit. For Alexandre there are multiple identical pairs of jeans and slim grey shirts. In Agnes’ unverifiable illness, Nina has agreed for a small fee to assume the responsibility of dispatching items from the wardrobe as well as her prop store. Typically she works on her own but she knows from watching what Agnes’ team does, and that most has been done in advance. Nina steams shirts already picked out so they are hot and fresh before each take. Half of them are now covered in sauce and soil and crumpled in Alexandre’s trailer. Someone else takes them away. Nina does not know whether they are laundered or thrown away.

  Behind the rails are 1920s relics from a previous shoot. Of dubious heritage but alright in a crowd scene. Silk slips, thick coats and paste jewellery from the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen: where props meets wardrobe. Nina slips past Alexandre’s endless jeans, rustling the bagging, and crouches down amongst fur. She sits like that for a little while, breathing in the must and damp. When her calves grow strained she sits down completely, burrowing back, legs sticking out in front. She manipulates an ancient sleeve as if a trunk. Parties. Dinners. Treasures bartered and sold for meat in lean times. Buffeted on either side of her cheeks with old fibres, it’s dark and warm.

  The door opens. A dart of li
ght hits the ceiling. It closes again. Nina gets up and brushes herself down, smoothing hair from her face where the static grabbed at it. She pulls the light cord, picks up her plate and fork, opens the trailer door, and slips the rubbish and leftover grains of saffron yellow rice into the trash.

  “A for change. Ten minutes to shoot,” strains through the walkie-talkie on the desk inside. She grabs the nearest bag of jeans-and-shirt and the mobile steamer, and heads for his trailer.

  Alexandre is watching make-up being applied to his face in a mirror bordered with lightbulbs. A flourish of powder from a soft brush ricochets off one high cheekbone. All texture is being erased. “Let’s do this!” he booms into the mirror when he sees Nina bearing clean clothes. She steps over the last change, collapsed formlessly on the floor, and hangs the new set on an empty rail to smooth out any wrinkles with puffs of warm steam. The plug is tricky. She bends down to tap it with her fist until it clicks into place and the green light of the steamer clicks on. Few wrinkles have appeared since she last steamed this particular shirt at 6am, the first task of the day on site. But there are a few. It seems unlikely a man eating dinner would have a pristine shirt. But this is advertising, and the mood board doesn’t contain creases. Market research urges convenience and clean lines for the affluent urban Parisians browsing today’s supermarché. Ralph chews gum into putty while wearing a white tank top. A glass sits drained of protein shake to one side, dull with residue. He has not yet been witnessed eating lunch on set. His tank top is thinly ringed wet under the arms. It clings to him. A hairdryer clicks on.

  Outside the sun is high. Nina trips, trying with one hand to catch the rickety rail and failing. A sprawl of black clad arms and legs on the yard’s hot, blanched dust surface. Sore spots seep into focus; a knee, her temple. She rolls into a ball and onto her side as someone on a walkie-talkie takes her elbow. Twisting her neck she sees it is Markus and shakes him off, embarrassed. But once she is on her feet she says thank you.