Car porn, redux
Click to viewFollowing yesterday's burst of leaded-petrol nostalgia, I dug out another film by utterly mad French director Claude Lelouch (nutcase responsible for Un Homme...), the short film above called C'etait Un Rendez-vous ("It Was A Date").
In it, a dude takes his car out into the early morning streets of central Paris in sometime in the mid/late 70s, & canes the utter living fuck out of it. It starts in the Paris Périphérique at Porte Dauphine, exiting up a ramp into the Avenue Foch. Well-known landmarks such as the Arc de Triomphe, Opéra Garnier, and Place de la Concorde with its obelisk are passed, as well as the Champs-Élysées. I shall leave it to the Wikipedia summary to elaborate:
Pedestrians are passed, pigeons sitting on the streets are scattered, red lights are ignored, one-way streets are driven up the wrong way, center lines are crossed, the car drives on the sidewalk to avoid a rubbish truck. The car is never seen as the camera seems to be attached below the front bumper (judging from the relative positions of other cars, the visible headlight beam and the final shot when the car is parked in front of a curb on Montmartre, with the famous Sacré Cœur Basilica behind, and out of shot). Here, the driver gets out and embraces a young blonde woman as bells ring in the background, with the famous backdrop of Paris.
& that's it. Eight minutes of ridiculously dangerous driving, one cuddle against the Paris skyline & that's your lot, Jimmy.
The motor is apparently a W116 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 (unhhhhhhhh), though the cheeky Gallic auteur apparently dubbed over the sound of his V12 Ferrari 275GTB, as anyone with half an ear could tell you (giant-engined Mercs don't come as manuals, which the car on the soundtrack clearly is, & Merc V8s certainly don't fucking sound like that).
The thing is, it's utterly fucking ludicrous. The bloke's really driving, on real streets, with real pedestrians scattering like confetti & real rubbish trucks backing out of sideroads, with real red lights ignored & real wrong turns down one-way streets... The thing isn't even sped up, as you can tell from the movement of pedestrians & pigeons, which clearly indicates an unhinged mind; the unseen driver pilots well over two tonnes of German Über-Barge (at an average speed that someone with a better intimacy with the streets of Paris than I has calculated to be about 70 MPH) through the middle of a major city, mostly illegally & totally irresponsibly, in one fucking take. Apparently, there was one (yes, one) observer armed with a walkie-talkie, but according to legend this broke, so the driver did exactly what you see, describing a crazed trajectory on that line somewhere out where will meets physics, "blind", as reckless & foolhardy as any Saturday night council-estate ram-raider.
I fucking love it.
If you want to talk about emotional authenticity in film, if you're one of those cunts who valourise the "real" & scorn the excesses of imaginative literature & art as somehow demeaning, do me a favour: don't fucking whine about Lars Von Trier or bring up Ingmar Bergman. Don't fucking tell me that the Bourgeois social-realism of Loach & Leigh are all that matters, you narrow-minded prick. Get me a pretentious French intellectual, a packet of Gaulois, an overpowered 19 foot long Deutsche Zerstorer luxury car, drag me out at fuck-knows a.m. on the streets of Paris, press your right foot down into the plush carpet as far as it'll go, & strap me underneath the front bumper, baby.
I got a blonde to meet, & a date to keep, in Montmartre, by the Sacré Cœur Basilica.
Race ya.