Paris Movie Walks, nominated Travel Guide Book of the year, now available for your iPhone!

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Winter In The Tuileries Gardens

"Seagulls on ice at the Tuileries Fountain in Paris"

On a stroll in search of new photo angles for use in the iPhone app being developed for the book Paris Movie Walks, we came upon the sight of birds that we think are seagulls (in Paris?)  on the frozen waters of the Octagonal Basin in  the Tuileries Gardens.

Ronin

Where Ronin was Shot

Not all news are good news, of course, and today’s update is not about a Parisian movie site that was recently found but about one that has been lost.

"Rue Drevet where Robert DeNiro appears in film Ronin  in Paris"

The stairway on which Robert DeNiro appears in Ronin, out of the blue Parisian night, is still there, connecting the Rue des Trois Freres and Rue Berthe in Montmartre, but the Irish bar run by Natasha McElhone at its bottom end, where two meetings of the “rogue Samurai” neatly bookend the film, has disappeared in a fire.

In its latest (and presumably last) incarnation, the place – while nominally a restaurant with specialties from Madagascar – had actually been a cocktail bar that had acquired some fame across Paris for the quality and low price of its drinks.

Nobody knows what caused the fire. I personally suspect that it was the work of renegade Irish Republicans under the leadership of that ghastly Jonathan Pryce.

Want to discover more places in Paris where famous films have been shot? Get Paris Movie Walks today!

Inception

Where Inception was Shot

When Inception came out – or rather just before it came out, when anything everybody had ever seen from it were a few clips and a print synopsis – it was hailed, even by journalists from serious newspapers (who really should know better) as a masterpiece, a thinking man’s adventure entertainment, half reflection on the nature of human consciousness, half action flick.

Once the movie was actually released, this initial enthusiasm quickly evaporated. It was plain for all to see that the producers, inevitably unable to square this particular circle and, faced with the need to go for big-box-office schlock or philosophical profundity, had called in the guys from the pyrotechnics department.

The Guardian’s movie critic awarded it in the end three out of five stars, which was probably par for the course.

There is, however, one scene in the film which has survived the general disappointment to become almost iconic, and many more people than those who watched the actual movie will have seen it pop up in various places, from news footage to features about the latest movie technologies and even heavyweight documentaries about the workings of the human mind.

This is the scene, shot in Paris but engineered in London, where Leonardo DiCaprio takes his young assistant – the girl whose role is to ask questions on behalf of a puzzled audience – to a street cafe in Paris. Or does he?

"Italian restaurant used in movie Inception"

This “Café Debussy” – around which the whole city of Paris eventually begins to fold up as though it was made of papier-mâché – is actually located on the corner of Rue Bouchut and Rue Cesar Franck in the 15th arrondissement, a few blocks south of the UNESCO building (Metro: Sevres Lecourbe).

In “reality”, however (please note the inverted commas: you can never be sure these days), the “Café Debussy” is an Italian corner deli that was converted by the filmmakers. (On Google Maps: Da Stuzzi or Italia Mia, 6 Rue César Franck, 75015 Paris, France.)

As though there were not enough street cafes in Paris. Ah, Hollywood.

And while you are purchasing your salad or Italian bread: ask yourself whether you can remember how you actually got there. When you hear Edith Piaf singing Je Ne Regrette Rien, you can be sure your dream is nearly over.

Want to discover more places in Paris where famous films have been shot? Get Paris Movie Walks today!

Hollywood and Paris – A Love Affair – Part III

American in Paris – Hollywood Ties The Knot With Paris

While Casablanca’s image of Paris also had its fair share of clichés – the wind in Ingrid Bergman’s hair down the Champs Elysees, the riverboat waiter with his striped sweater and beret, the statuette of the Eiffel Tower on the bar in Bogart’s restaurant – the street scenes are actually fairly matter of fact. The images say: this is a street in Paris, it’s a little foreign and may look somewhat different from your local main street in Dayton, Ohio,or Peru, Indiana, but that’s all there is to say about it. Nowhere is it implied that this street was better than a street anywhere else in the world.

But this is exactly what the street scene in An American in Paris tells us. Almost the first thing we learn about Paris – introduced by a kaleidoscope of her main sights, accompanied by jaunty music and a Gene Kelly voiceover – is that it is “a Mecca for the arts”. It’s magnificent, inspiring, beautiful – and that is only the beginning.

"Paris street scene in the movie An American in Paris - Hollywood and Paris, a love affair part 3"

Because it is also, as we learn on our little tour of Kelly’s residential quarter,”urban” in the best sense of the word, a place where dissimilar elements meet and merge into a symphony of diversity, like different colors on a canvas: the young couple in their passionate embrace and the priest on his bicycle, the street cleaner and the bourgeois, the nuns and the kids, the tailor’s atelier and the book shop. It is also the place of a thriving and well-functioning community. Everybody is friends with everybody else, just like Gene Kelly is friends with the  street urchins who are waving to him from the pavement.

Everything, in one word, is the negative mirror image of suburban America where you are only ever likely to meet somebody who is a lot like yourself.

Finally, to top it all, the scene where the music hall singer enters the bar. Everybody is happy to see him, loud voices are being raised: “Come and see who’s here!” This is clearly more Italy than France. Not that such a scene would be any more likely to occur in Rome than in Paris or anywhere else, but this is not an issue of reality but one of cinematic cliché: the mother figure coming straight from the kitchen, wiping her hands on the apron, the embrace – that is Sophia Loren, not Brigitte Bardot.

But this has ceased to matter. This is a Paris of the mind, a fantasy, a mythical place that appears to stand in for everything that America never had or once may have had only to lose it on its way. A place into which Americans project their collective longings.

"Paris street scene in An American in Paris - Hollywood and Paris, a love affair part 3"

By this time, Hollywood had clearly lost its critical bearings for its beloved, and more such Parisian love stories were to follow throughout the 1950s. After An American in Paris, Sabrina was shot in 1954, FunnyFace in 1955 and Gigi in 1958.

These four films – not the only, but the most important Hollywood movies of the period that were set in Paris – tell essentially the same story. The protagonist is always a young person who is taken out of his or her normal context – American or, in the case of Gigi, domestic – and travels to Paris (“society Paris” for Gigi) where he or she acquires sophistication and finds romance, in this order, though not as a consequence of it. This is an important point: the real reason why the protagonists find love and romance is always the purity of their hearts

Have you recognized the plot? You will have if you are familiar with the theory according to which all stories reflect one of a certain number of narrative archetypes. Because this is, in essence, the story of Cinderella, of “virtue rewarded”.

Now, all theories and all points can be overstretched to the point of caricature, and neither this theory nor this point are an exception. Nevertheless, it appears that America, the virtuous ingénue, has met the world, played in this Hollywood movie by Paris, fallen in love and “tied the knot” – to live happily ever after.

Only, of course, that she would not. But that is a story for another article.

Read Part I of Hollywood’s Love Affair with Paris here…

Read Part II  of Hollywood’s Love Affair with Paris here…

Hollywood’s Love Affair With Paris – Part II

We’ll Always Have Paris

Four years are not a long time in history, but can be long enough to change the way people look at things. Let’s see how America viewed the world in 1943.

Casablanca introduces Paris with an establishing shot of the Arc de Triomphe and follows this up with a back projection of Bogart and Bergman driving down the Champs Elysees, the Arc in the back.

"Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca"

The differences to Ninotchka are striking. Firstly, we are being shown a building we can instantly recognize and we know at once where we are. Using a shot of the Arc or the Eiffel Tower as visual shorthand for “this picture takes place in Paris” has since become a convention in its own right.

But this may not yet have been the case at the time. The people who made Casablanca, at any rate, gave it a thought and asked “How can we introduce our location in such a way that everybody in the audience immediately knows, in one glance, where we are?” The people who made Ninotchka did not.

Secondly, the wide shot of the Arc de Triomphe is followed by a back projection of Bogart and Bergman in their convertible, the Arc in the background, instantly connecting the characters to the scenery.

And thirdly, after that, we are being treated to another 30 seconds or so of “establishing sequences” set to music – Bogart and Bergman on a pleasure boat and in a room with a view of the Sacre Coeur – before the action actually resumes and the first line of dialogue is spoken between the two. By which time we are firmly embedded in the place – in a way we never were in Ninotchka.

After a short dialogue sequence between Bergman and Bogart, a street scene follows in which we are informed that the arrival of the German occupying forces is imminent.

"Paris street scene in Casablanca"

The scene, in its form, is not necessary from a narrative point of view.The fact that the Nazis are approaching could have been conveyed more easily and more economically, with Bogart and Bergman shown listening to a radio announcement, for example.

"Ingrid Bergman and Humphrey Bogart Casablanca"

But the makers of Casablanca decided to go for a street scene, showing their two protagonists in the middle of a crowd of equally concerned Parisian citizens. We can assume, with some confidence, that the makers of Ninotchka would have handled this differently.

"Ingrid Bergman in a Paris street scene in Casablanca"

In itself, this shows little. However, if we widen our focus to include the general tone of the two films under review, if we contrast Ninotchka’s “fewer but better Russians” arrogant sarcasm with Casablanca’s earnest and honest passion, we can trace back the journey the United States took – between the late 1930s and the early 1940s – from the role of a distanced observer to that of an involved participant.

In their own modest way, these two films reflect the fact that, in the battle for the American soul between isolationists and interventionists, the latter had by now gained the upperhand.

The third part and final example I will cite will be from the movie An American in Paris that was made in 1951 – by which time something new had clearly been added.

Part III of Hollywood’s Long Running Love Affair With Paris contiues with An American in Paris“…

Read Part I of Hollywood’s Long Running Love Affair with Paris  here