2008年9月2日星期二
A Walk through Cinematic Paris
Truffaut's Grave
Rue Milton
Inside Café des deux Moulins
Café des deux Moulins
Au Marché de la Butte
Lamarck-Caulaincourt Metro
Moulin Rouge
A Walk through Cinematic Paris
By Kevin Conroy Scott
In Paris, the neighborhoods of Montmartre and Pigalle are seperated by the Boulevard de Clichy, a street littered with bars, nightclubs and dance halls such as the infamous Moulin Rouge. This is an area that was built on the desires of the Parisian middle-class in the 1890's. Montmartre was a breeding ground for artists and like-minded bohemians as it was just beyond the rich, bourgeois quarters of the 8th and 16th arrondissements. "I will provide low life for millionaires," says Moulin Rouge impresario Jean Gabin in Jean Renoir's French Cancan (1955) – his father the painter Auguste had a rented house where Jean was born (the Château des Brouillards is still perched on the slope of the Butte in Montmartre, at 13 rue Girardon). Renoir's exuberant celebration of la vie Bohéme was to be recreated almost fifty years later by the Australian director, Baz Luhrmann, in his Moulin Rouge! (2001), although this film was to be shot in a studio in Australia, where the lead actress Nicole Kidman sang cover versions of pop hits by Madonna and David Bowie.
Two of the most loved and exported French films were also shot in this area. Above Moulin Rouge stands the Café des deux Moulins where the do-gooder Amélie Poulain spun her plans of making others happy in Montmartre. Below is where Francois Truffaut, some 40 years earlier, made his first feature film about his alter ego, Antoine Doinel, a teenage delinquent coming of age on the streets of Pigalle. Recently I traced the footsteps of these magnificent but very different films with the hope of figuring out which one better captured the heart of Paris.
In case you weren't one of the 25 million people in France who watched Amélie (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2001) at the movie theatre here's the plot: after returning a long-lost childhood treasure to a former occupant of her apartment, and seeing the effect it has on him, Amélie Poulain, a single waitress, decides to set out on a mission to make others happy and in the meantime pursues a quirky guy who collects discarded photo booth pictures. The film has been responsible for placing a few new landmarks on the Parisian map. At the metro station Lamarck-Caulaincourt, where Amélie helps a blind man across the road then rushes him down the street, whispering into his ear all the things he can't see. Lamarck-Caulaincourt is 100% Parisian - it's a cute curiosity of a metro station, carved into the hill like a hobbit hole with a small entrance that is sandwiched between two stairways. It typifies the quaint charm of Montmartre that Amélie captured. Amélie was particularly popular in Japan where an Amélie craze occurred, resulting in thousands of Japanese tourists visiting Montmartre each year.
"I asked my waiter, Sebastien, what he thought of Amélie. He shrugged his shoulders and told me in French, 'I haven't seen it.' I'm not sure I believe him."
The two other notable and more obvious Amélie landmarks are a grocers and an unassuming neighborhood café. One stop south on the Metro from Lamarck-Caulaincourt is the Abbesses metro station. Exit and walk up the hill and through Place des Abbesses you come to Rue des Trois Frères at number 56 is Au Marché de la Butte, the grocery store where Amélie regularly buys three hazelnuts and one fig and plots her revenge against the cruel French owner and his simpleton Algerian assistant. The grocer, whose real name is Ali Mdoughy, has kept the sign "Maison Colignon, fondée 1956" from the movie and will talk to anyone passing about Amélie. One of the shop's front windows is now a showcase with newspaper clippings about the movie and the shop. It feels like you've walked into a restaurant where the owner proudly takes photos of himself with celebrities who dine with him. If fame is fleeting, I wonder when Amélie's charms will extinguish for Ali and the Maison Colignon. When I stopped by his shop, I was not surprised to find three Japanese students posing for photos outside, one touching a replica of the garden gnome that Ali has used to decorate his store.
If you walk back to the Abbesses Metro station and walk back along Rue des Abesses in a westerly direction you will come to Rue Lepic. Turn left and at number 15, on the right hand side, you'll find the epicenter of Amélie's world: the Café des deux Moulins. The interior is exactly like it was in the movie and the window on the side street is decorated with the poster of the movie, with lead actress Audrey Tautou smiling at us from behind the glass. The longtime owner, Claude Labbé, sold the café after much thought under the condition that the interior remains in tact although there are rumors abound about the café being made into an Amélie theme bar or a fast food restaurant. The new owner eliminated the classic cigarette stand to make more room for tables. When I visited the café, I noticed that the space occupied by the tabac is now a circular area that seats twelve. The copper colored bar, mustard colored ceilings, lace curtains and 1950s décor have been preserved, including the neon wall lamps. I visited on a Sunday afternoon and it appeared to me that there were many locals going about their routine, having a coffee, sipping wine, some checking their emails on laptops. I even noticed two French couples, in their 60s, on a double date. As Marvin Gaye and Frank Sinatra played behind the bar, I looked around and noticed that there were a few cameras on tables; I wasn't the only tourist visiting. I fought the urge to ask any of the female waitresses if they had done any good deeds that day. Instead, I asked my waiter, Sebastien, what he thought of Amélie. He shrugged his shoulders and told me in French, "I haven't seen it." I'm not sure I believe him.
In 1958, Francois Truffaut, the enfant terrible of the French film world, embarked on his directorial debut after spending more than a few years dismantling other people's films through his incandescent reviews and essays as a critic. It was an emotional shoot, Truffaut's mentor and surrogate father, André Bazin, died just before the first day of shooting. If the 18th arrondisemont is the Ground Zero of Amelie, then the 9th is essential Truffaut. In the 1950's it was known to be a working class neighborhood who's reputation suffered at the hands of the disreputable Pigalle, where you could take in a strip show or visit a prostitute. Truffaut's childhood was an unhappy one, he lived in a three room apartment with his mother and his step-father who adopted him, sleeping in the doorway on a bench that converted into a cot. His mother was cold and was not afraid to let her son know that he was unwanted. Truffaut's childhood best friend, Robert Lachney, (a character portrayed by the wily René in the film), recently gave an interview by way of DVD commentary. Not only did Truffaut ask him for his thoughts on his childhood when writing the film, Lachney was also an assistant director on set. "He was exceptional," Lachney said of Truffaut. "Within a few days of meeting him I told him he was the smartest person in the class when in reality he was the last and I was second to last." It's obvious from The 400 Blows that Truffaut and Lachney were the type of students who spent more time thinking how to get out of school work than they actually put into their assignments.
The locations of The 400 Blows are less iconic and somewhat harder to find than Amelié. The actual school where Truffaut and Lachney studied was at 35 rue de Milton. The main drag where the boys hung out was Rue Fontaine which runs from Place Blanche and becomes Rue Notre Dame de Lorette – "this was our place" Lachney said on the commentary. Truffaut would meet Lachney at the Place Breton and further down Rue Fontaine you'll find Rue de La Rochefoucauld, where in the film the physical education teacher takes Antoine Doinel, Rene and other classmates for a run. As the camera takes to the rooftops and looks down at the street (an iconic technique of the emerging New Wave), we see the teacher frantically blowing on his whistle, jogging ahead, ignorant to the the children's mocking him as they peel off in pairs to avoid a session of exercise.
Along the Boulevard de Clichy in the early 1940s, the time when Truffaut was going through his turbulent troubles, there were 24 cinemas in one mile. This was a playground for Truffaut and Lachney who would sneak out at one in the morning and steal the movie stills which were advertising the movies in glass cabinets outside the theatres. They would open the glass cases with screwdrivers and then, before returning to bed at 5 AM totally parched, they would gulp stolen milk that had just arrived on the milk float's morning run.
There are two locations which are seminal to The 400 Blows and Truffaut as a man. The first is Place de Clichy. When you arrive there by Metro, you might notice that this is the place where Antoine and Rene, playing hooky for the first time together, pass by Antoine's mother. She is in the arms of another man. Antoine sees her, she sees Antoine. When she comes home for dinner that night, Antoine is there, performing his chores. They say nothing about the crimes they've both witnessed. And later, when Antoine is in borstal and visited by his mother, he never tells anyone what he saw. It is this level of complexity that made The 400 Blows the winner of the Best Director Award at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, only two years after Truffaut was banned as a critic for his caustic remarks about the backwards state of French cinema.
If you walk north up the Boulevard de Clichy it will merge into Rue Cauliancourt, which runs through the final resting place of The 400 Blows. This is where Francois Truffaut is buried. After becoming a French icon while making some incredible films (and also a few bloatedly bad ones that as a young critic he probably would have railed against) Truffaut died in 1984 after a short illness from a brain tumor. Thousands attended his burial on a bright sunny day. As had been Truffaut's wish, his close friends Claude de Givray and Serge Rousseau spoke a few words at his graveside. De Givray had first thought of using Sartre's famous line, "Any man who feels he is indispensable is a bastard!" – a line uttered often by Truffaut, who was aware of his fame but feared being too self-important in the eyes of his friends. In the end, De Givray took inspiration from a line in the Frank Capra film, It's a Wonderful Life. James Stewart plays a generous man who is saved from suicide by a guardian angel named Clarence, who lets him briefly visit a world where he wouldn't have existed; he is shown what the lives of his dear ones would have been like if he had not been born. And so it was that the friend delivered a fitting oration to the crowd gathered around the director's grave: "If Francois had not been born, if he had not been a director…" Truffaut's grave was covered with flowers on the day I visited. It's a polished slate of black marble, a surface that reflects and absorbs. It simply says: Francois Truffaut, 1932 - 1984.
It's there, in the cemetary, where the spirit of Pigalle, Truffaut, finds a final resting place in the heart of Montmartre. Whatever your thoughts about Amélie and The 400 Blows and their wildly different versions of Paris, it is hard to deny the magnificence of the magic of Paris. If it's a glass of red wine at three o'clock on a Tuesday afternoon, a naughty cigarette as you watch couples stroll by your café, or being asked to take a picture of Japanese tourists in front of a poster of Amelie (OK, not so great, but a reality), this is one neighborhood that won't let you down.
More Montmarte Moments
* Jean-Pierre Melville's 1955 Bob le flambeur opens with the sun rising over the Sacre-Coeur, the sugar-domed church that overlooks Montmartre and Pigalle.
* John Huston's 1952 Moulin Rouge features the fictional life of the diminutive Henri Toulouse-Lautrec, famous for his provocative images of 'modern' Paris, which are now used for almost every postcard and coaster you see sold on the banks of the Seine.
* Jean Renoir's 1931 La Chienne about a sap in love with a street walker was shot on the actual bustling streets of Montmartre.
* In Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau), the two heroines meet by accident in the Montmartre.
* Albert Lamorisse's Oscar-winning short The Red Balloon follows the little boy chasing his balloon through the Montmartre.
* At Studio 28 (10 rue Tholozé) the famous independent movie theatre you can see Jeanne Moreau's feet in cement, the paint that was used by the facists to protest against Luis Bunuel and Salvidor Dali's surrealist short film, L' Age d' Or (1930). You'll also notice that the cinema was designed by none other than Jean Cocteau. www.cinemastudio28.com
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