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

Five Travel Writers(5)

Dubbed "Jack Kerouac for the Internet Age" by USA Today, Rolf Potts is the award-winning author of Vagabonding: An Uncommon Guide to the Art of Long-Term World Travel. He has reported from more than sixty countries for the likes of National Geographic Traveler, the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Slate, and National Public Radio. His adventures have taken him across six continents, and include piloting a fishing boat 900 miles down the Laotian Mekong, hitchhiking across Eastern Europe, traversing Israel on foot, bicycling across Burma, and driving a Land Rover from Sunnyvale, California to Ushuaia, Argentina. This fall will mark the debut of his newest book, Marco Polo Didn't Go There, which is already garnering buzz as one of the most eagerly anticipated travel books of 2008.

Here Potts takes a break from his hectic travel schedule to choose his five favorite movies about cities.

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Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola's understated intergenerational romance takes place against the backdrop of a Tokyo that is both incomprehensible and weirdly gorgeous. This is not a tale of seasoned travelers discovering the truths of a city; it is a story about two accidental tourists using the strangeness of a new place as an unwitting pretext to examine their own lives. When Bob and Charlotte (Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson) leave the sterile cocoon of their Shinjuku hotel rooms and make tentative forays into the city (to a shrine, a subway, a game room, a karaoke lounge, a hospital), we discover Japan as they do — as outsiders, enjoying the simple moments of confusion, connection, and joy. Coppola doesn't provide subtitles for the Japanese dialogue — nor does she indulge us in cheap cross-cultural epiphanies — and in this way she draws us into Bob and Charlotte's culture-shocked disorientation as they make their private discoveries amid the neon sprawl of Tokyo.
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Before Sunset

Perhaps the best thing about Richard Linklater's romantic indie-sequel (co-written by actors Julia Delpy and Ethan Hawke) is that Paris is used as a setting for Céline and Jesse's brainy intimacy — not as a clumsy symbol of romance itself. Indeed, apart from a well-timed glimpse of the Notre Dame cathedral, this is not a Paris of iconic landmarks and easy clichés; instead, it's a real-time stroll through the anonymous beauty of the city's Left Bank back-streets. As a veteran flâneur of these 5th arrondissement avenues (I teach a writing class at the Paris American Academy each summer), I can attest that wandering the city at random is the best way to experience the splendor of Paris, regardless of whether or not you take an elevator to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Near the end of the film, Celine is herself startled by the spectacle of her own city as she and Jesse take a tourist boat down the Seine. "This is great; I've never done this," she says. "I forget how beautiful Paris is." In avoiding the obvious as he portrays the city, Linklater shows us just how deep that beauty can be.
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Do the Right Thing

Though I'm not sure anyone has ever made this comparison, Spike Lee's provocative 1989 film has a lot in common with Jean-Pierre Jeunet's whimsical 2001 movie Amélie. Both films portray city neighborhoods (Bedford-Stuyvesant and Montmartre) with lyrical and mythic strokes — and both directors were accused of glossing over the seedier nature of their urban settings in the process. While Jeunet's Paris is firmly rooted in fantasy, however, Lee's New York feels disconcertingly real as the film explores racial tensions over the course of one witheringly hot day in Brooklyn. Cannes judge Wim Winders famously noted that Do the Right Thing doesn't have any heroes — but this doesn't make the film any less powerful as Lee's flawed characters make their fateful decisions along the brownstone stoops and tree-lined avenues of "Bed-Stuy."
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Boogie Nights

Los Angeles is undoubtedly the most over-portrayed city in the history of film, but Paul Thomas Anderson's L.A. isn't Hollywood — it's the San Fernando Valley, better known for its porn stars than its movie stars. Fittingly, Anderson's breakout movie was Boogie Nights, a porn-themed ensemble piece that showed how the backyard pool parties and strip-mall nightclubs of Reseda can carry a nostalgic glamour all their own. The filmmaker's Oscar-nominated 1999 follow-up to Boogie Nights took its name from one of the San Fernando Valley's principal thoroughfares — Magnolia — and further illuminated the complicated texture of a place that is so close to (yet undeniably separate from) Hollywood.
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About Schmidt

As a native son of flyover country (I grew up in Wichita, Kansas), I appreciate how Alexander Payne set his first three films (Citizen Ruth, Election and About Schmidt) in Omaha without ever resorting to the kind of knee-jerk sentimentality and condescension that mars so many cinematic portrayals of Midwestern America. In About Schmidt, Jack Nicholson's character wanders his way through a wintry blue Nebraska that looks imposing and urban, even as it feels provincial and isolated. In this way, the city inhabits the screen not as an idealized postcard, but as dynamic character that lends to the mood of the movie. About Schmidt could have been shot anywhere, but the specificity of Omaha gave the film a unique resonance. As Payne told the New York Times when explaining why he set his movies in Nebraska, "I hadn't seen the Midwest in a movie. I wanted to see it. It was as simple as that." Anyone who's lived in a mid-sized, mid-American industrial city will see how Payne's films ring that much truer as a result.

Five travel writers on their favorite city films

City Confidential
Five travel writers on their favorite city films

"Location, location, location," is the sage advice given by Sylvia Miles playing a grizzly real estate agent in Wall Street, a film whose title discloses both its address and theme. In most films, location is as significant an element as character and plot — sometimes even more so. Would Lost in Translation make any sense out of Tokyo? Is there any other city for Roman Holiday? Would anyone go see a Woody Allen film called Manhasset? From films such as Walter Ruttman's Berlin, Symphony of a Big City through to Patrick Keiller's London (which our own Keith Griffiths wrote about here) and beyond, cities beguile filmmakers with their elusive and unique qualities.

To mark the upcoming DVD release of In Bruges — a film about a city if there ever was one — we asked five travel writers to pick their five favorite movies about cities.

Five Travel Writers(4)

When Tony and Maureen Wheeler arrived in Sydney the day after Christmas 1972 after a six month Asia overland trip from Europe they had 27 cents left between them. In late 1973 they started Lonely Planet Publications to publish Across Asia on the Cheap, the story of their trip from London to Australia. From that self-published guidebook Lonely Planet Publications has grown to become the world's largest independent guidebook publisher with more than 500 titles in print, over 400 staff and offices in London and Oakland as well as the head office in Melbourne. Tony and Maureen still travel for nearly six months each year and Once While Travelling, the story of their life together and the creation of Lonely Planet, was published by Penguin Books in late 2005. The New York Times described Tony as "the trailblazing patron saint of the world's backpackers and adventure travelers."

We asked Wheeler to pick the favorite cities he has visited on his big screen travels.

I'd hate to choose anything obvious, there are so many movies about the same much-filmed cities, New York, Paris, Rome, Venice and so on. So I'm going to try for some less obvious ones:

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The Year of Living Dangerously

Jakarta

Even though none of it was filmed in Indonesia (I think the Philippines stood in), it still captured the hot-tropical-nights flavor of Indonesia with the possibility of somebody running amok (it's an Indonesian word) always in the background.
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Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome

Coober Pedy

Whether the Australian opal mining outback town with its underground houses qualifies as a "city" might be a spoiler, but this Mad Max episode certainly gets some of that mad, bad and dangerous-to-know atmosphere of the place.
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Blade Runner

Los Angeles

OK, L.A. has been filmed to death, but this is a different L.A., one where it rains all the time, much of it looks like the back blocks of somewhere in Bangkok or Osaka and yet befinned Detroit iron can still make a cameo appearance behind the flying cop cars.
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The Lives of Others

Berlin

I missed pre-Wende (the "turning point" or "change" as Germans refer to when the wall came down) Berlin, but I've heard so many tales about the old East and West Berlin from German friends in Berlin that it's become one of my favorite cities. This film captures the creepy feeling of the old Stasi-plagued Berlin. Then try Good Bye, Lenin! for the new city.
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Arabian Nights

Isfahan

"Isfahan is half the world," the Iranians like to claim and in a film that is as much travelogue as drama Pier Paolo Pasolini could convince you it's true. This is a film that absolutely makes you want to go places — Ethiopia and the Yemen as well as Iran.

Five Travel Writers(3)

Heidi Julavits is the author of three novels, The Mineral Palace, The Effect of Living Backwards and most recently The Uses of Enchantment. She is a founding co-editor of The Believer magazine and the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her travel pieces have appeared in the New York Times and Travel + Culture, among other places.

We asked Heidi to pick her five favorite films about cities.

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Rosemary's Baby

Manhattan

New York geography, to me, is all about interiors — especially apartments, tiny spaces that represent a unique psychological world you can enter with a key. It's like stepping inside someone's head. I especially love how the bright, airy apartment in Rosemary's Baby becomes so toxic and terrifying. The plot could be described as the psychic make-over of a space.
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Saturday Night Fever

Brooklyn (specifically, Bay Ridge)

This movie is all about the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (you thought it was about disco). The Verrazano Bridge looms like a mountain range over Bay Ridge and over Saturday Night Fever. It represents escape from New York (via Staten Island) and the possibility of real or figurative death, and works as a central image to reinforce the movie's (and, you could argue, the borough's) defining tension.
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Spirited Away

Kyoto

OK, so nowhere is it specified that Spirited Away takes place in Kyoto. Having lived for four months in Kyoto, however, I felt that Spirited Away, with its bath houses and its focus on ritual that can, with one wrong move, give way to a spooky scatological deluge, really captured the experience of living in a swift and modern city that is so haunted, and excellently so, by its ancient past.
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Vertigo

San Francisco

San Francisco has always depressed me, and felt very stealthily sinister to me, and Vertigo aptly captures the implicit dank menace of that city, better than the actual city does.
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Band of Outsiders

Paris

If I were a Parisian hack criminal, or just a Parisian tourist, I hope I'd make time to kick back in a café, do a little dancing, and smoke a lot of purely recreational cigarettes while looking greasily fabulous.

Five Travel Writers(2)

Pico Iyer is the author of seven works of non-fiction (including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk and The Global Soul), and two novels, Cuba and the Night and Abandon. His most recent book, The Open Road, describes thirty years of talks and travels with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.

FilmInFocus asked Iyer to select five cities he enjoyed visiting on the big screen.

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2046

Hong Kong

Wong Kar-wai has, since Chungking Express, been the poet laureate of the new urban mishmash, in which tenses elide, cultures collide and the result, in his moody urban vision, is romance. I love the Oriental Hotel in which the action of this film unfolds — a site in the imagination, in effect, though I recognize it on the back-streets of many an Asian city — and I love the way he takes the road-trip movies of Wim Wenders, and replaces dislocation with connection, whimsy with obsession, however fleeting.
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The Buena Vista Social Club

Havana

No city I have visited is more ravishing, layered, complex and intriguingly contradictory than Havana, and, though plenty of films have caught its light-and-shadow (Strawberry and Chocolate, Before Night Falls, I am Cuba), none has quite found its dilapidated beauty, the wonky way in which it dances, as Wim Wenders did in this innocent-seeming documentary. Music, spirit, imagination are all that have kept the crumbling island afloat for the past forty or more years, and if you want to see how that miraculous process works (I tell my friends), please see this film.
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Mystic River

Boston

I lived in Boston for four years, and came to grow ever more impatient with the glossy images of Harvard Yard, the postcard pictures of Back Bay redbricks, with which we try to comfort (or to blind) ourselves, and to tame those realities that unsettle us. It took Clint Eastwood, and his magisterial, contemplative gaze, to find a Boston that I recognize, gritty, worn-down and compromised, and to play out in it a Greek tragedy that any Harvard professor should recognize. Eastwood so illuminated the truth of Boston that it's easy to imagine that he opened up the city for the king of juiced-up urban landscapes, Martin Scorsese, to come in and make his Miltonic Departed, claiming in Boston all the intensities and dramatic power that it's not always easy to see closer to home.
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City of God

Rio de Janeiro

Fernando Meirelles gave us Rio, terrifyingly, irresistibly, consumingly, in this movie, but he also showed us the global city as it is everywhere — Johannesburg, Mumbai, Mexico City, Jakarta. That is how, as he revealed also in The Constant Gardener, he caught not just his home country, but the shadow side of countries everywhere, the places we screen out, our unlegislated and often repressed sub-conscious. City of God begat Tsotsi and the new urban movies of our young century.
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Monsoon Wedding

Delhi

I saw Mira Nair's knowing, piercing, jubilant film the day after I flew out of Delhi — and felt I'd never left. Never have I seen a film-maker capture, with such easy, natural precision, the complexities, and the tangled warmth and chaos and cruelty, of my parents' India, offering us the middle-class companion-piece to the unhoused sorrow of Salaam Bombay (the only film to reduce my Bombay-raised father to tears). And in her last film, The Namesake, she took her novelistic gift even deeper by giving us the immigrant experience with a sense of nuance and poignancy and human shading that no novel I have read has begun to match.

Wong Kar-wai, Wenders, Eastwood, Meirelles and Nair excite and exhilarate me because they not only alight on particular cities in their movies, but also light up the entire planet. In that sense, they both give us the unknown and give back to us the world we know. I'm tempted to believe they're helping to hymn the new century into life.

Five Travel Writers

Ayun Halliday is the sole staff member of the quarterly zine, The East Village Inky, and the author of four self-mocking autobiographies, including No Touch Monkey! And Other Travelers' Lessons Learned Too Late and Dirty Sugar Cookies: Culinary Observations, Questionable Taste. Her first children's book, Always Lots of Heinies at the Zoo will be published in the spring of 2009. She lives in Brooklyn with the playwright, Greg Kotis, and their exceptionally well-documented young. You can visit her website here.

Halliday took a break from globetrotting and maternal duties to indulge her cinematic wanderlust.

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Underground

Belgrade

Emir Kusturica's surrealistic history of the former Yugoslavia cuts a wide Balkan swath, but what really sticks with me is the insanity of that opening scene, where a horse cart bearing two shit-faced, gun-toting ne'er-do-wells careens through the streets of Belgrade, trailed by a phalanx of hired gypsy musicians. It was so thrilling, I had this visceral desire for the same exact scene to happen to me! Actually, it almost did in the Hotel Putnik, in Novi Sad.
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Before Sunset

Paris

The premise of this saga is so gut-wrenchingly romantic, and the Parisian setting so universally potent, it's tempting to turn back the clock in order to get a crack at spending the rest of my life bedeviled by what-ifs and if-onlys. I've wandered those same streets on numerous occasions, but must admit that my own experiences have been comparatively staid, especially that time I went with my mom.
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Daughter from Danang

Danang

Midway through this emotional non-fiction rollercoaster, I relaxed my grip on my hankie long enough to think, "God, I miss Vietnam. I could really go for some of what they're eating…" And that, I guess is a central difference between a casual visitor like me and the subject of this film, taken from her mother as part of the Ford administration's Operation Babylift and raised as an "all-American" girl, only to…whoopsie-daisy, you know what? Rent it before blabbermouth here spoils it for you.
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Lost in Translation

Tokyo

The sensory pop overload of Tokyo's Shibuya and Shinjuku neighborhoods captured through a credibly jet lagged lens. My Tokyo-reared friend Reiko was far less impressed than I, possibly because she understood everything everyone was saying, even the wacky talk show host and the constantly bowing officials, on hand to make linguistically-challenged Western ding dongs like me go, "Oh yes, yes, that's Tokyo to a T!"
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The Edge of Heaven

Istanbul

Fatih Akin's exhilarating, punk romance Head-On got me all a-drool to visit Istanbul, but damned if he didn't manage to pump out another feature film before I could get it together to get my underfunded, overscheduled heiner anywhere near the Bosphorus. The German-language bookstores and hilly outdoor cafes of his latest have doubled my determination, especially since his take on Turkish prisons is far more reassuring than the widely disseminated Midnight Express version.