The idea of the artist as someone who spends his life in shabby circumstances, outwardly neglected and caring only for the purity of his art, to find fame only much later, preferably after his death, is one of the great Romantic myths. (It is, of course, the story of the ugly duckling in all but name.)
In truth, for every van Gogh, there are at least a dozen Picassos and Matisses whose geniuses are detected at a fairly early stage and who spend nearly all their lives in great material comfort.
Truth, however, is not something that myth has ever been greatly concerned with.
Circumstances do not come much shabbier than the old Beat Hotel on the Parisian Left Bank, and geniuses not much more self-conscious than William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg who lived there for a while in the late 1950s (together with Gregory Corso and some lesser lights of the “Beat” poetry scene).
A new documentary just released (read a review here) retraces their steps, refreshes their legends and restages some of their antics.
is the name of a novel by Harold Norse who joined the party in 1960: the actual hotel on 9 Rue Git-le-Coeur (between the Quai des Grands Augustins by the Seine and the Rue Saint André des Arts in the Latin Quarter) never traded under that name.
Actually, it never traded under any specific name, apparently considering names – and quite a few other things besides – a flippant luxury.
The “Beat” was a “category 13” hotel on the official list of the French tourism board, quite literally “off the scale”, with 42 rooms but only a single bathtub that needed to be booked and paid in advance, including a surcharge for warm water. Bed sheets were changed once a month, the curtains – in theory – every spring.
The building still exists, and it still houses a hotel – which, incidentally, prides itself on its literary heritage, adding the sobriquet “The Beat Hotel” under its name of Le Relais du Vieux Paris.
I suspect, however, that the Vieux Paris, a four-star bijou hotel, is far less keen on continuing some of the other traditions of the Beat Hotel, and that the hotel’s guests – at a price of € 189.00 per night (cheapest double) – expect hot water to be available not just on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.
(You obviously would want to plan a better holiday for yourselves than end up in a hotel like this on your next trip to Paris.)
Hugo Cabret, Martin Scorsese’s latest film, is set in Paris, but nearly the entire movie was shot on a studio stage, in the spirit of George Méliès, one might say, on whose life story much of the film is based. (The silent movie pioneer, a master of the “artificial”, the fantastic and surreal, really did operate a toy shop in the Gare de Montparnasse for several years after WWI.)
The puzzle is not so much why Scorsese preferred to recreate 1920s Paris in a studio but why he bothered to shoot on location at all, and then only for scenes that are of secondary importance to the narrative and that do not enrich or embroider the film’s visual impact in any meaningful way.
The two scenes in question were shot on Place Edouard VII – we can clearly see the king’s statue behind the two youthful protagonists – and, just fifty metres away, on Square de l’Opéra Louis Jouvet where Hugo and Isabelle sneak into a cinema.
Scorsese could easily enough have done for these two scenes what he did for all the others: shoot them on a stage in Shepperton, delivering an entirely studio-based film, which is what Baz Luhrmann did a few years ago for a similar project of high artifice (Moulin Rouge). That would have saved his producers the expense of hiring 30 vintage cars and 250 extras and of paying 250 technicians, some of them undoubtedly flown in at great cost.
And to top it all, for his two “on location scenes” for Hugo Cabret, Scorsese chose a couple of Parisian side streets that are lined with English shops, English pubs and, of course, that feature the statue of an English king.
Either this shows that the Paris locations for Hugo were not chosen with particular care – or it is an underhand way of showing where the movie’s real heart lies.
Because Hugo’s gloomy side streets, its labyrinthine maze of dark passages and the story’s set of characters (featuring violent drunks, merciless coppers and embattled orphans) appear to owe more to Charles Dickens’s London than to the “real” Paris of the interwar years – so memorably depicted in Midnight in Paris.
And, before any of you ask: no, you would not have been able to look down on the Eiffel Tower from the original clock tower of the Gare Montparnasse – not least because the Eiffel Tower was, at the time, the highest building in Europe.
That is the part of the film that owes its setting to the imagination of its creators – and mere fantasy.
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For most of The Tourist’s 103 minutes, director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck bravely struggles to commandeer the disparate elements of the film – the reworked script, the leading couple with little or no obvious personal chemistry, the glamorous locations – into a coherent whole.
I leave it to you to judge how well he ultimately succeeds, but one thing is for sure: the walk through Paris on which Angelina Jolie takes us at the beginning of the film, trying to shake off the police, has been very well laid out and does not violate the city’s geography.
This may be damning with faint praise, but praise it most certainly is. After all, everybody who is familiar with Paris knows films where people whose apartment has a view on the Eiffel Tower slip into their morning gown…
– Cut! –
…to buy a pair of croissants in a bakery underneath the Sacre Coeur (3 miles to the north).
Whatever you can say about The Tourist, no topographical logic was violated in the making of this film. After all, it is at least conceivable that a lady with an apartment at the Place de Victoire …
… would take her morning coffee at the Le Nemours coffee shop next door to the Comedie Francaise. (That’s a five to ten minute walk.)
And while the Passage Jouffroy on Boulevard Montmartre …
… may not lie in the flight path of a crow on its way from the Nemours to the metro station Quatre Septembre, the little detour is certainly understandable, considering the circumstances.
Although, on balance, perhaps Miss Jolie should have worn a different pair of shoes.
But then again: this isHollywood – and The Tourist more so than most films you will be going to see this year.
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This Guest Review is brought to you by Cheap Flights UK
There are hundreds of movies about Paris, so you may think that the subject has been overdone. But as the end of the year approaches an interesting and unusual take on the city has been presented in cinematic form. You will have heard of it – “Midnight in Paris” is the darling of the reviews and has been heralded by the press and the public as a masterpiece.
The beginning of the film is not unusual. The main character, Gil, catches a flight to Paris with his fiancée, Inez, and her parents.
The disenchanted writer spends the start of his holiday listening to Inez’s old friend Paul, who is constantly contradicting people, and generally being a pain.
Paris loses its appeal, until….suddenly his holiday is improved when at stroke of midnight he is transported back into the 1920s, where he meets a plethora of celebrities starting with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Gertrude Stein.
Woody Allen treats these celebrity characters with the respect they deserve and the film is one of the best of its kind. The story line may seem nonsensical, but with the light touch of Allen involved the story suddenly seems believable.
Gil has always wanted to be in the company of these greats, and after his encounters he seems to come alive with the Paris sprit that we all know and love. The city is one of the main players in the film, and could even be one of the main characters.
Paris was the centre of movies of old, but now it seems as if the filmmakers of today will find inspiration in the city once again.
The door of the building where the marital home of Catherine Deneuve’s character in Luis Bunuel’s Belle de Jour was supposed to be. A magnificently ornate but ultimately soulless piece of haut-bourgeois architecture on the Ave. de Messine near the Parc Monceau.
