Paris Movie Walks

Paris Brothels

Do Paris Brothels Still Exist?

Maisons closes or “closed houses”, where prostitutes offered their services, were for centuries an institution in Paris, but have been banned since the end of WWII.

Quite a few of those maisons plied their trade in the centre of town, near the great offices of the French Republic and the Catholic Church, but many more preferred the relative obscurity of calm and bourgeois side streets in what were then the “near suburbs”.

Montmartre, of course, has always had more than its fair share of the flesh trade. The building on 30, rue Lepic – in the middle of today’s busy street market, opposite the Cafe Aux Deux Moulins of Amélie fame – once housed a particularly famous gentlemen’s club.

But most of the action took place a few blocks to the south, in the bourgeois surroundings of the 9^th arrondissement.

The notorious Chez Christiane, for example, catered for its mainly SM-oriented clientele in the building at 9, rue Navarine – behind, of course, the kinkiest facade in the street.

A few blocks to the west, Chez Marguerite on 50, rue St Georges, catered for customers with more orthodox tastes. It was also known to be the favourite place of Hermann Goering during the years of the German occupation when most brothels were exclusively reserved for members of the occupying forces and their French collaborators.

It was ultimately this scent of collaboration that rang the death bell for the brothel trade after the liberation of Paris. In 1946, the maisons closes were closed indeed – on the insistence of the (then still powerful) Communist Party.

Do you know of any Paris brothels in your neighbourhood?

A Stroll by the Seine

Nearly all Hollywood movies about Paris have at least one of the following: a shot of the Eiffel Tower, a scene on a stairway in Montmartre, and a long, romantic longing view over the Seine.

Pleasure boat rides on the Seine feature on most tourists’ itineraries, but a leisurely walk by the riverbank can be as much fun.

Let’s start our stroll by the Seine from the Musee d’Orsay on the Left Bank and proceed up to Notre Dame Cathedral where I suggest you take a drink or a light snack in one of the restaurant boats while listening to the echo of Gene Kelly’s serenade in An American In Paris.

Indeed – one day Gibraltar may tumble, the rockies may crumble, but Paris in the spring (or at any time of the year) will still be a pretty good place to be.

"Skater in front of Musee d'Orsay on the Left Bank of Paris"

Let's start at the Musee d'Orsay

"Tourist river boat on the Seine in Paris"

Watch the tourists float by. Remember to wave!

"Barges parked along the Seine in Paris"

Peek into a house boat moored by the Seine....

... to see some domestic life on a house boat.

"Ile de la Cite by the River Seine in Paris"

Pass by the Ile de la Cite....

..and a sailboat parked by the Seine

"Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris seen from the River Seine"

On towards the Cathedral of Notre Dame

"Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris seen from the Seine"

Getting there...

...to your destination.

Taken

Where Taken was Shot

It makes for good PR if a city can boast that it has provided the backdrop for a major feature film and the tourism office hacks can use that fact in their brochures. And they rarely fail to do so.

The possible exception to this rule is the movie Taken.

What this movie tells its audience can be roughly summed up as follows: Here’s the deal – You send your daughters to Paris and they will be drugged and raped, sold into prostitution, and possibly killed, without the French police batting as much as an eyelid. Actually, the city’s coppers are even in on it and share in the proceeds. Now, form an orderly queue, please. There is room enough for everybody.

Welcome to the City of Lights!

Maybe the shame which the – largely – French crew must have felt about this storyline explains why Paris is shot in such a strange, understated way. The exteriors never give you a feeling for any particular Parisian area or street.

Neither are there lush establishing shots of the type that you find in nearly every other American movie about Paris. Instead, the houses are always shot in isolation and zoomed close-ups, as though they were all protagonists in a 1960s spaghetti western.

Nevertheless, you can spot a few major Parisian landmarks along the way, proof that the film was actually shot on location rather than with the help of some cut-price Eastern European body double.

The Eiffel Tower puts in a cameo appearance behind the house in which the two American girls are “taken“ (on 9, Avenue d’Eylau, nearest metro Trocadero).

And when Liam Neeson meets his policeman friend (in front of the legendary Fouquet’s bar on the Champs Elysees), the Arc de Triomphe at the end of the street provides a little local atmosphere.

“The house” where the American girls are drugged and trained by their Albanian captors is located on no. 5, rue de Paradis, in the 10th arrondissement near the Gare de l’Est , not at all the type of “Southern Bronx” neighbourhood the film appears to suggest but in reality is one of the most interesting and lively quartiers of the capital. (If you go there, do explore the adjacent Rue du Faubourg Saint Denis with its wonderful mix of Mauritian, Kurdish and North African delis and cake shops.)

Action scenes in Paris are always a problem these days. The city administration has become very blasé and reluctant to grant anything more than a one-day permit for a daytime shoot – as even Stephen Spielberg had to find out for Munich.

Taken’s action sequences are consequently shot either indoors or on sites such as the rubbish dump where Liam Neeson eradicates half of the male Albanian population – with two exceptions.

"rue des Pretres Saint Germain l’Auxerrois in Paris, a scene in the movie Taken in Paris"

Firstly, there is the scene where Liam Neeson leads the French police on a wild goose chase by connecting two mobile phones together in such a way that the police trace him down to the restaurant l’Auxerrois on 13, (behind the Samaritaine department store, nearest metro: Pont Neuf) while he is actually standing on top of the church Saint Germain l’Auxerrois across the road. (He is taking the phone call from his policeman “friend” who is sitting on a bench in the Square du Vert Galant, the very tip of the Ile de la Cité).

That scene was tightly edited to give it some pace. But, if you think about it, the film actually contains not much “action” in the common cinematic sense – apart from one shot where the police cars take a screeching-tyre turn from the rue de l’Arbre into rue des Pretres Saint Germain l’Auxerrois.

"rue Eylau Paris where a scene of the movie Taken was shot"

There is a bit more to see in the film’s culminating action sequence, a wild car chase down the quais – the freeway-like road by the banks of the Seine – during which Liam Neeson jumps off the Pont des Arts into a Bateau-Mouche-style pleasure boat (to thwart “pleasures” of a kind that are not normally offered on board, at least not as part of the standard 10-Euro-a-head tourist ride).

But even here, in its signature action scene, Taken finds it hard to shake off its restraints: the pacy editing that needs to substitute for more elaborate stunts ensures – in combination with the effects of a night shoot – that the city’s skyline is condensed into a string of blurry lights. Taken’s Paris, here as in the scenes before, never really comes to life.

Paris and Pompidou

Rambuteau is the nearest metro station to the Centre Pompidou.

Forty years after it was built, the Centre Pompidou can still trigger angry discussions. Is it the first post-modernist masterpiece or just a grotesque piece of street theatre, the Ubu Roi of modern architecture? One thing is for sure: the building will not leave you indifferent and will ask you to come out on one side or the other. There is no middle ground here.

The Centre is named after the French President Georges Pompidou whose objective it was to drag Paris into the modern era and to make it look like a 20th century city. Like Birmingham, for example. Or Bucharest. The ideas to replace the old markets of Paris with the Les Halles shopping centre and to build high-speed motorways on the banks of the Seine were also his. As was the Montparnasse Tower.

God knows if anything of fuddy-duddy Paris would still be left if he had not died, suddenly and in the middle of his first term, in 1974.

This week’s submission to Travel Photo Thursday at Budget Travelers Sandbox where Nancie offers a chance every Thursday for fellow travelers to post their favourite photos. Get over to her blog and check out what other travel bloggers and photographers are posting.

Is Paris The City Of Love?

Paris the City of Love

First of all, it is important that we agree on the sheer absurdity of the notion. Love is not something to which any city could or should stake an exclusive claim. There can be a “city of love” as much as there can be a “city of indigestion” or a “city of nosebleed” (although I could list a few candidates, particularly for the latter). Love may or may not be all you need, but it is literally all around – or in the air, depending on your choice of song.

Still: if you type “Paris city of love” into the Google search bar, you get 32 million hits. That’s quite a number.

Browsing through these 32 million hits, however, is a less than fully enlightening experience. They appear to boil down to the theory that beautiful buildings, somehow, enhance romantic appetites. That is an interesting proposition and raises the question of how the citizens of Oakland muster the energy to procreate at all.

On the other hand, I will now forever forego any attempt to ply reluctant female acquaintances of mine with alcohol and just take them to the nearest medieval church where they will simply rip their clothes off in some architecturally inspired frenzy. Life will be much easier from now on.

The idea of Paris as the city of love must date from the late 19^th century – there is little evidence that Robespierre and Napoleon thought about their capital in this way. The late 19^th century was a time when France was already in terminal decline: Britain was the richest country around, Germany the most aggressively youthful one, and on the horizon you could already see the Yankee bear throwing off its slumber and slowly crawling towards its Manifest Destiny.

So the French decided, in a typical fit of French pique, that national wealth and success was something that only barbaric hordes would be interested in. They would henceforth concentrate on the truly important things in life and turn them into a form of art: wine, food, and … well, you get the idea.

The truly amazing thing is that the rest of the world fell for this, hook line and sinker. 32 million hits do not lie.

This is where I should stop this article if I had any sense at all. But I don’t – which is why I will share the following with you.

Having googled “Paris city of love”, I went for the slightly more specific “Paris” + “city of love” and received the far neater and more easily digestible count of 155,000 hits. After which I replaced the name of “Paris” with the names of other cities, arbitrarily chosen ones at first but quickly progressing to more and more unlikely candidates. (And if I tell you that this was the most interesting thing I did all week ,you get a sense for the sad type of existence I lead.)

There were a few surprises. I would never have thought, for example, that Kalamazoo would get as many hits as Saint Tropez (about 15,000).

I was also a little disappointed that the count for Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, was not lower than its actual number of 1,100, but a closer reading will probably reveal that this “love” is of the variety that one comrade feels for another when they are jointly involved in some party business or another (like holding up flags in various colours to form huge portraits of Kim Il Sung in giant football stadiums).

I also learned quickly that the hit count for any place in Europe is inflated by references to Paris (travel ads and such like). Furthermore, there is an eponymous website which commercializes those aspects of “love” that can actually be commercialized.

For some Scandinavian cities in particular, the first four or five hits all offer you the services of an escort. And sometimes, finally, the “city of love” is used in a distinctly ironic way, such as in “Winnipeg may not be officially known as the City of Love”. (Indeed it may not.)

Ultimately, of course, I was searching for that perfect “black hat town”: the place for which “city of love” provided zero hits. But I never got further than Murmansk (438), Ulan Bator (392) and Niamey, the capital of Niger in West Africa, which gave me my best result of 158 hits.

Anybody who can do better?

It’s the month to celebrate love! Come and celebrate it in Paris. Have you looked at a France ferry to get you over? Hurry!

(I write this piece in conjunction with a piece I submitted as a guest post to BootsnAll)

Paris Movie Walks