An Education was one of the surprise hits of 2009. An English production without any major stars, it eventually picked up three Oscar nominations, including one for best picture. Carey Mulligan (who was also nominated, as was novelist Nick Hornby who wrote the screenplay) plays an intellectually premature teenager in early 1960s (suburban) London who is wooed by a slightly older and vastly more worldly man.
Paris and, more generally, France, serve as the film’s metaphor for sophistication (in her spare time, Mulligan’s character reads Camus and listens to French chansons), and the trip to the French capital is an important milestone on her coming-of-age journey. (Not least because this is where she loses her virginity.)
But while the Parisian scenes are undoubtedly important for the narrative structure of the film, they still appear to have been patched together on a shoestring. (It’s not Hollywood, after all, and it shows.) What we are getting is loads of shots up buildings and bridges, filmed “from the waist up”, avoiding the need to dress up shop fronts and windows. All scenes were shot in places without car traffic, so there was no need to decorate the streets with expensively hired vintage cars either.
We see Mulligan and her boyfriend on the Quai de Montebello, in the shadow of Notre Dame Cathedral, and on the Square du Vert Galant (the tip of the Ile de la Cite) where they have an improvised picnic in the sunset. We also (briefly) see them dance on the Ile St Louis (the Quai d’Orleans) to the music from somebody’s battery-operated record player,that ghetto blaster of the 1960s. Altogether, no great effort appears to have been made to recreate the Paris of the 1960s.
With one exception. One scene was shot – on the upper section of the Rue Chappe stairway in Montmartre – where no expense was spared.
The scene which took 20 to 30 people almost a whole day to set up was apparently conceived like this: the camera follows a man on a bicycle, delivering a bunch of baguettes, down Rue Gabrielle before it pans past the lovingly arranged row of period cars at the bottom of the stairway and accompanies the protagonists on their way up towards the church of Sacre Coeur.
I know this because I saw how the scene was shot, literally in front of my drawing room door. Of this, only about three or four seconds (Mulligan and her friend on the stairway) eventually made it into the film. All the rest must have wound up on the cutting floor.
At least I now have an idea why major feature films, even those done on a relatively tight budget, are so expensive.
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Cheri is Hollywood’s belated sequel to Gigi. The two don’t seem to have much in common, but think about it: Both Cheri and Gigi are children of courtesans, both films are based on novels penned by Colette and set in Belle Epoque Paris. Although one explores the dark and troubled side, the other always keeps on the sunny side of Parisian life.
Both stories are centered on the same truth: that love is a very powerful beast indeed, the one human instinct that has not been thoroughly domesticated. We may try to tame it, in the knowledge that it can wreck even our most carefully thought-out schemes and designs, but we must never think that we have it fully under our control. If we let our guard slip for one instant, it can turn on us and tear our hearts out with a single strike of its savage claw.
The key location of the movie is the place where Michelle Pfeiffer has her flat: a building known as the Hôtel Mezzara (60 Rue de la Fontaine in the 16th arrondissement) which was designed by Hector Guimard, better known perhaps as the designer of the Parisian Metro stations.
In the film, director Stephen Frears shows us a cobbled street where Pfeiffer’s toyboy – the eponymous Cheri – approaches his lover’s house, but this was actually filmed half a dozen blocks away in Rue Eugene Manuel just off Rue de Passy. The doorway where Cheri seeks cover is the entrance to the building at no. 2, a famous Art Nouveau apartment building designed by the architect Charles Klein.
Other Parisian locations include the church of Saint Etienne du Mont where Cheri gets married, the Hotel Regina where he moves in after separating from his wife, and, inevitably for a movie which so lovingly displays Belle Epoque splendour in all of its Art Nouveau decadence, the restaurant Maxim’s where Cheri spends many a carefree evening. (In the film, the restaurant is called the Dragon Bleu.)
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The church in front of which Matt Damon is standing with Franka Potente (implied to be not very far from their hotel in Belleville), when he begins to assemble the evidence for his lost identity, is St Joseph in the 11th arrondissement.
To see this church, simply proceed as follows: At the start of Walk no. 10, on leaving the Metro station Belleville, walk into Rue du Faubourg du Temple, full of the most interesting shops that sell all kinds of third-world tat from (probably toxic) Chinese Barbie dolls and fake fur jackets to flesh-coloured Christs that glow in the dark.
Turn left into Rue Saint Maur and walk once around St Joseph’s Church on your right before continuing into Rue de l’Orillon. (If you walked once around the church, this street is now on the right hand side of Rue Saint Maur.) After a hundred meters or so, turn left into Rue Louis Bonnet where you can see the Hotel de la Paix from The Bourne Identity, still closed after what must have been a massive fire. (Quite frankly, it does not ok as if the hotel was to reopen any time soon. The second floor has been bricked up to prevent squatters from getting in.)
From here on, simply continue as advised in the book. (You may also want to note the large number of really good, really cheap – if, admittedly, not exactly pretty – Chinese restaurants in the street.)
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Julie and Julia is a hybrid movie: one half is the story of a young Internet blogger in modern New York, while the other half tells the story of the cookery writer and TV personality Julia Child and is set in the Paris of the intermediate post-war years.
Most of the Paris scenes of Julie and Julia are interiors: for the simple reason, one may assume, that it is a lot more convenient – and a lot, lot cheaper – to create a period feeling in a studio than it is on location.
If the Paris of the movie nevertheless comes across as a sun-drenched, vibrant and colourful place, this is due not only to the luck the production team had with the weather but also to the astute use they made of their time in Paris. They were only given five days of shooting on site, but managed to cram in a fair number of scenes that were shot on location.
How did they do it? Well, with some careful thought and a few tricks. Some outside locations, for example, pop up in different parts of the movie – such as Streep’s flat on 10, Rue de Seine, just around the corner from the Pont des Arts and the Academie des Beaux Arts. (The flat is incredibly grand for a young-ish couple such as Julia and her husband who appears to be a junior diplomat at the US Embassy, but never mind.)
The scene where Julia does her grocery shopping (at the Mouffetard market in the 5th arrondissement) took three days to set up and a whole day to shoot, so that one had to earn its upkeep as well (another case of multiple use).
Other locations were apparently selected because they required little dressing up: Shakespeare’s and Co. (37 Rue de la Bucherie), for example, where Julia inquires about English-language books about French cuisine, the back of the Notre Dame Cathedral where Julia and her husband, played by Stanley Tucci, take a stroll, and the Art Nouveau bakery where Julia buys her croissants (called the Patisserie du Moulin de la Galette and located on 48, rue Caulaincourt, down the stairs and once around the corner from Avenue Junot in Montmartre.)
Julia and her friend (played by Simone Beck) coordinate their strategy for a potentially tricky meeting of the writing team during a walk on the tip of the Ile St Louis (on the Quai d’Orleans, with a cross-river view of the Quai aux Fleurs on the Ile de la Cite).
The team meeting is subsequently held on the terrace of the restaurant La Maison at the bottom of Rue Pave, one block away from Notre Dame Cathedral on the Left Bank.
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