Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris

by Robb, Graham

  JULIETTE stops, pulls his arm, points at his face: La trompette…tu fais comment?…

  DAVIS mimes trumpet playing; JULIETTE stands on tiptoe and kisses him on the lips.

  Long take: they continue walking along the Seine. A few people pass–no one pays any attention to them (use extras), except an angler worried about his jars of bait.

  Music: faintly recognizable improvisation on the tune of ‘April in Paris’.

  They reach the steps that lead back up to the street near Place du Châtelet. Davis looks out along the river, then runs to catch up with Juliette.

  DAVIS, taking her hand: Say, what is an existentialist, anyway?

  JULIETTE smiles inscrutably.

  Music continues as they walk up to the busy street.

  32. NEWSREEL.

  (Faster film stock; grainy.)

  Blank screen, numbers counting down. 7, 6, 5, 4, 3…

  Voice-over: suave, becoming increasingly sarcastic.

  NARRATOR:

  The quartier of Saint-Germain-des-Prés…

  The square and the church. Close up of crumbling, ivy-covered walls.

  The remains of the oldest abbey in Paris. A corner of the provinces in the heart of the city. Here, time passes more slowly.

  Place de Furstemberg; pushchairs; an old woman feeding pigeons, another knitting on a park bench.

  In this quiet little square, one can visit the studio where Delacroix revolutionized the art of his time. Sometimes, it seems as though nothing has changed…

  Pavement in front of café. Respectable bourgeois men and women reading newspapers, stirring cups of coffee.

  There’s the Café de Flore…

  A teenage girl and boy walk past: she wears a sweater, Capri pants, sandals laced above the ankle, pony-tail; he has an open-neck shirt, beard, cigarette dangling from his mouth. The camera lets them pass, then swivels quickly to follow them. Lingering shot of girl in centre of screen. She tears the wrapper from a chocolate ice cream and drops it on the pavement.

  Did I say nothing had changed?…The Café de Flore is now a temple–a temple whose high priests are called Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.

  Café table with empty coffee cup and overflowing ashtray, and two books: Le Deuxième Sexe and Les Mains sales.

  And the name of this cult? EXISTENTIALISM!

  Frantic trumpet and cymbal.

  Bookshop: young people picking through books; handwritten posters–‘Are you for or against?’, etc.

  The Club Saint-Germain, underground dance-floor. Men in sunglasses, women in split skirts. Fast jazz music.

  Close up: crude painting on wall based on le Douanier Rousseau’s The Muse Inspiring the Poet: Sartre in dinner jacket with pipe in mouth, next to a long-haired figure resembling Juliette Gréco.

  Some say that this misty philosophy, which no one understands, not even its exponents, is essentially Germanic; others that Sartre and his acolytes are the Trojan Horse of ‘the American way of life’. And who could deny it?

  More scenes of dancing.

  Jazz…the jitterbug…American cigarettes…

  Relaxed, laughing faces, chewing gum.

  Those GIs feel quite at home at the Club Saint-Germain!

  Close up: young man wearing flat cap, sunglasses, toothy smile.

  ‘Homo existentialis’ wears sunglasses and lives underground. His bookstores, bars and, yes, his ‘discothèque’, are all several metres below sea-level–probably because of his morbid fascination with the Atom bomb. And, of course, he–and she–wears black…Black (slight cough) is his favourite colour…

  Black American enjoying the music and the dancing.

  Cut to: Sartre walking along a pavement talking to an earnest admirer.

  Who is that man who looks like a gargoyle come to life, or a grocer going back to his shop?…You don’t know? Why, that’s the man who started it all!–Jean-Paul Sartre. He’s the one those long-haired adolescents call ‘master’. The author of…‘Being and Nothingness’, ‘Nausea’, ‘Dirty Hands’–well, you get the picture…

  News footage of Sartre talking to Simone de Beauvoir at a literary party.

  Ask any of the young women who’ve been invited up to the master’s room…I’m told on reliable authority that there’s a distinct smell of Camembert chez Jean-Paul Sartre…

  13. The floods of 1910 and the Nord-Sud Métro before its inauguration. Maurice Branger (1910).

  14. Le Corbusier, ‘Plan Voisin’ (1925). ‘How can we deal with the problem of Paris? The ‘great East–West throughway of Paris offers the City Council the chance to launch a gigantic financial enterprise.’ The two tiny blobs in the central square are the Porte Saint-Denis and the Porte Saint-Martin.

  15. Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler and Arno Breker being filmed on the terrace of the Palais de Chaillot, 23 June 1940. By Heinrich Hoffmann.

  16. ‘Playground. Children only. No Jews.’ November 1942.

  17. Statues used as p metal during Occupation. he foreground: he Marquis Condorcet, acques Perrin. he statue was er recast and stored to the uai de Conti. Pierre Jahan, 1941.

  18. The Liberation of Paris: FFI Resistants at a window of the Préfecture de Police, 25 August 1944.

  19. Mona Lisa returns to the Louvre from a castle in the Quercy, June 1945.

  20. Juliette Gréco and the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. By Georges Dudognon.

  21. Barricade on the Boulevard Saint-Germain near Rue Hautefeuille, May 1968. By Alain Dejean.

  22. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir selling La Cause du peuple, 1970.

  23. The Arc de Triomphe, from ‘Le Plitch’, in Mémoires d’outre-espace (1983) by Enki Bilal. ‘The Government and I shall soon be in a position to offer you rational explanations for this delicate problem!…’

  24. The Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre and the route of the Eurostar, looking west from the Col de la Chapelle.

  25. President Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurating the ‘Historial Charles de Gaulle’ at Les Invalides, 22 February 2008. By Melanie Frey.

  Po-faced NARRATOR of documentary sitting at café table: chequered suit, black-rimmed glasses, trying to look older than he is; waiter removes his cup. Narrator speaks to camera: zoom from across the street–vehicles and pedestrians pass in front of him in a blur.

  Well, it’s not what I was brought up to think of as French literature…The only thing resembling an idea I could find in all this ‘philosophy’ seems to be this: we’re all free to do whatever we like…Well, then…(Picks up the books from the table.) I, too, am an existentialist…(Stands up, tosses the books into a dust-cart, and walks off down the street.)

  Jazz music.

  Blur of windows: camera whizzes back along the shop-fronts to:

  33. CAFÉDE FLORE.

  (Higher quality film stock, as before the newsreel.)

  SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, DAVIS, JULIETTE. A continual stream of words. The conversation goes on, almost too fast to be followed, above the sound of other customers (including the director), the garçons shouting orders, twirling trays; mobylettes, car horns, police whistles, etc.

  JULIETTE follows the conversation but also looks around at the other tables and the life of the street. Her silence and facial expressions area continual counterpoint to the conversation.

  SARTRE talks with DAVIS in English. He speaks grammatically but with an atrocious accent. The cigarette is never far from his mouth. (No subtitles.)

  SARTRE:…because your music has a political resonance…

  DAVIS: I just blow the trumpet, man. I blow that trumpet and the sounds come out and the cats dig it…Or they don’t dig it; it’s all the same to me. (Long fingers flutter.) Politics is what I’m getting away from.

  SARTRE: From my point of view, this is a political act.

  DAVIS, leans forward: It’s just music, man.

  SARTRE: Yes, jazz music, which is an expression of liberty.

  DAVIS, leans back; forced smile: That’s a white man’s word–jazz. White men always wan
t to put a label on everything. They’re just tunes, man. I take the tunes to pieces and I put them back together in different ways, without the clichés…

  SARTRE: Yes, and then no one can hear the tune without really hearing it. (Stubs out cigarette; taps another from the packet.) For example: here is a glass. A glass on the table.

  DAVIS picks up his glass, drinks, puts it back on the table: Uh huh.

  SARTRE: I say, ‘glass’, and the glass is exactly the same as before. Nothing happens to it, except perhaps it oscillates, but not very much. It is as if the glass does not give a shit.

  DAVIS: Heh! This is existentialism, right?

  SARTRE: No, Gréco is existentialisme if you believe the journalistes. (Smiling.)‘La Muse de l’existentialisme.’

  All look at JULIETTE. She watches a woman in Dior clothes walking past with a poodle, which lifts its leg at a tree.

  SARTRE: This is not existentialism. This is a man who is talking to another man…

  DAVIS looks intently at Sartre.

  SARTRE: But when I say the word ‘glass’, something has happened. The glass is not any more in the shadows. It is not…(looks at Beauvoir)…perdu dans la perception globale des choses…lost in the global perception?…When I name something, this is not without consequence, which is what the man who uses violence–la torture–( Juliette looks up) what he understands when he forces another man to say a name or a telephone number or an address. (To the garçon.) Oui, apporteznous une bouteille. (To Davis.) This is why we can say that the writer and, in a certain sense, the musician, removes the innocence of things.

  DAVIS, laughing: Yeah, that’s what I do, man, I ‘remove the innocence of things’!

  SARTRE: So, for example, in the Alabama, the oppression of the Negroes is nothing until somebody has said, ‘The Negroes are oppressed.’

  MILES cocks his head; looks doubtful. That’s a place I ain’t never gonna see…

  SARTRE: Or, a better example: in La Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal–Vous la connaissez, Gréco, La Chartreuse de Parme? (Juliette smiles noncommittally.) Mosca, le comte Mosca, is very worried by the feelings–the feelings he cannot define–which his lover and Fabrice have for one another. And he sees them go away in the carriage, sitting one next to the other, and he says, ‘Si le mot d’amour…’, euh, ‘If the word amour–love–is pronounced between them, I am lost…’ (Blows out smoke.)So you have, when you name something, a responsibility.

  DAVIS places his hand on Juliette’s.

  BEAUVOIR, smiling at Davis and Gréco: Oui, la responsabilité!…But do you know when he said this, when Sartre said this, about la responsabilité de l’écrivain?

  SARTRE, emptying his glass, titters.

  BEAUVOIR: He was invited to give a conférence at UNESCO. It was the first meeting of UNESCO, two or three years ago, in 1946. At the Sorbonne. The evening before, we went to the Schéhérazade, with Koestler and Camus. And Sartre–you remember?–danced with Mme Camus, which was like watching a man lugging a sack of coal. He was very drunk, and he had to give his talk in the morning, but he had not written a line.

  DAVIS, pointing a finger at Sartre: The teacher hadn’t done his homework!

  BEAUVOIR: Yes, and Camus, who was also drunk, said, ‘You will have to do it without my help,’ and Sartre said, ‘I wish I could do it without my help.’

  SARTRE, stubby fingers spread on the table, giggles.

  BEAUVOIR: And then–he does not remember this–we had breakfast Chez Victor at Les Halles: soupe à l’oignon, huîtres, vin blanc–and then it was dawn, and we stood on a bridge over the Seine, Sartre and me, and we were so sad about la tragédie dela condition humaine–eh oui!–that we said we should throw ourselves into the river. But instead of that, I went home to my bed, and Sartre, he went to the Sorbonne to talk aboutla responsabilité de l’écrivain…

  DAVIS: That’s cool, Jean-Paul. They knew you were talking straight because you hadn’t prepared…

  BEAUVOIR, shaking her head: No, Sartre, he had everything already in his head.

  SARTRE, with his wall-eyed stare, purses his lips, looks serious: What can we do? We can only try not to make ourselves guilty. That is what I said at the Sorbonne. It was after the Libération. (The garçon arrives with the next bottle. Sartre fills the glasses. To Davis, suddenly:) Why don’t you and Gréco get married?

  DAVIS, looking at Juliette: Responsibility, man…I love her too much to make her unhappy.

  BEAUVOIR, to Juliette, smiling: Il vous aime trop pour vous rendre malheureuse.

  JULIETTE kisses Davis on the cheek. They look at each other. Close up: both in profile.

  JULIETTE (to Beauvoir): Il ne veut pas m’emmener avec lui aux États-Unis.

  DAVIS: Ayta-Zoony? Oui, mauvais, très mauvais pour les Negroes. Et très très mauvais pour les femmes blancs avec les Negroes.

  SARTRE: But you can remain in France, where everybody loves your music.

  JULIETTE, to Sartre and Beauvoir, looking at Davis: Vous ne trouvez pas qu’il ressemble à un Giacometti?

  DAVIS: Jacko Metti?

  WAITER: Je vais vous débarrasser…Vous allez dîner?

  BEAUVOIR: Will you have dinner?

  DAVIS, looking at Juliette: No, we gonna find ourselves a bridge and look at the river, and then maybe we’ll jump in…Shit, I just came here to play music, I wasn’t expecting none of this.

  A CUSTOMER (the director) at one of the neighbouring tables, folds his newspaper, stands up and leaves.

  JULIETTE pours some sugar into a cone of paper, reaches over and takes an empty ashtray from the next table, and puts both items into her bag. Stands up and takes Davis’s hand.

  SARTRE, to Juliette: ‘Si tu t’imagines…’ You haven’t forgotten, Gréco?

  JULIETTE, leaving with Davis, looks back, shakes her head.

  Zoom back: ‘existentialist’ young man in street looking into dust-cart, takes out a book and leafs through it. Walks off down the street, reading the book.

  34. EXT. HÔTEL LA LOUISIANE, RUE DE SEINE.

  Camera pans slowly from ground floor to top floor of the hotel–grimy shutters, window boxes, balcony railings. Pause at the top floor.

  35. INT. HÔTEL LA LOUISIANE.

  Hotel room. DAVIS in bed; JULIETTE sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking at him.

  Silence.

  DAVIS: She’s called Irene. She’s a good girl. I care for her a lot. But she’s like…She’s not like you. She doesn’t have your independence…She doesn’t have your style…I mean…

  JULIETTE, looking sad but not distraught; it is unclear how much of Davis’s talk she understands: Tu vas rester ici (pointing down), à Paris…en France?

  DAVIS: I dunno…I could get used to being treated like a human being…He’s right, Jean-Paul. Everybody likes my music. But that ain’t good. Anything I play, the audience cheers. It gets so I’m not even sure it’s me who’s playing…But if I go back to the States, I sure as hell ain’t gonna find another woman like you.

  JULIETTE, getting back into bed: Tu reviendras un jour. Et tu m’enverras tous tes disques…

  Mellow trumpet music.

  The following sequence is an accompaniment to the music rather than the other way about. (As in scene 18, ask Davis to improvise–but without showing him the sequence. Show some of the unedited take of scene 31 along the banks of the Seine.)

  36. OPPOSITE THE HOTEL, RUE DE SEINE.

  (This is the same location as Juliette’s childhood home in scenes 12 and 14.) The view of windows across the street. Dissolves, showing sunlight on the face of the building, from morning to late afternoon.

  37. PLACE SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

  JULIETTE and DAVIS. His arm around her shoulders–his tall body towards the camera, his face in profile, kissing Juliette. Her face, also in profile, her head tilted back, her body arched like a musical instrument. (Copy the pose from a Robert Doisneau photograph.) The spire of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés appears in the background. The angle of the shot makes
it look as though they stopped to kiss among the traffic while crossing the square.