For those of you who were secretly hoping that my gig in Paris would fall through and that you'd be able to make all sorts of snitty remarks about how the Laws Of Nature were finally (and deservedly) getting medieval on my ass, you'll have to wait. The gig is a go (the delay in surety caused only by big bureaucracy taking fuckin' forever to sign a simple contract), and I'll be in the City of Lights in a few days. Pauvre, pauvre moi.
And my work for other clients is finished, so I'm feeling as if I were already on vacation, so Road Trip Mind is setting in. To celebrate, and to "recapture the mindset" (à la Michael Mann's 1986 "Manhunter") I'm celebrating today by re-watching three of my favorite "Paris movies." The first may not be known to you, but should be, especially if you love Paris and love the classic black-and-white images you've seen of it in the work of Robert Doisneau and Henri Cartier-Bresson. It's a 2005 classic by Luc Besson, better known for his action films such as "Leon: The Professional" and "Nikita" and "The Fifth Element." As with all three of the films I'll be rapping about, it's one man's unashamed and unabashed love song to Paris, but this one is also an homage to film itself, being somewhat of a takeoff of Frank Capra's "It's A Wonderful Life." In "Angel-A," the person standing on the bridge contemplating suicide is not a family man but a bit of a Parisian scam artist down on his luck, played by Jamel Debbouze. If you know him at all, it's from his endearing role in the third of the movies I'll be rapping about, but *everyone* in France both knows him and loves him; he was the ONLY big star in that movie, before it became an international phenomenon. Anyway, as in IAWL, as he (5'5" short and not all that attractive) is standing there on the bridge about to do himself in, an angel played by Rie Rasmussen (a 5'10" statuesque and beautiful Dane who is a filmmaker in her own right) appears, and they begin a series of misadventures. It's a lovely movie, full of heart, but what makes it utterly spectacular is the photography. The cinematography by Thierry Arbogast is all in black-and-white and high contrast, colors that the City of Lights wears well. The second film is Woody Allen's 2011 "Midnight In Paris." Woody can be either "on" or "off" with his movies these days, but this one is so ON it's like a return to his best work in the 70s (it won the Oscar for Best Screenplay and got Woody nominated for Best Director). Gil (Owen Wilson, *wonderful* in this role) is in Paris with his fiance, who really doesn't "get" his love for the city and what he associates it with, the era of the "Living well is the best revenge" writers and artists in the 20s. Gil feels out of place in our modern world, and longs to be a writer himself. He identifies with people like Hemingway, Cole Porter, Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald, Joséphine Baker, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Djuna Barnes, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, Luis Buñuel and that crowd. So what happens? Magic happens, and he is magically transported every midnight back in time, and gets to hang with them. It's really a lovely film, one of Woody's best, and the shots of Paris (this time with color cinematography by Darius Khondji) are To Die For. The third film, of course, is Jean-Pierre Jeunet's love song to the neighborhood where he lives in Paris, "Le fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain," better known to non-French as "Amélie." There has never BEEN a more realistic portrait of Paris presented onscreen, which is curious in a way because at the time it was released, "Amélie" was the film containing the most CGI modification of any film ever made. Literally *every* shot was color-modified, to present it not as it looked when captured on film, but as how Jeunet saw it in his mind. Le Cafe des Deux Moulins, as it looks in real life: Le Cafe des Deux Moulins, as Jeunet sees it: That's the way I see Paris in my mind as well. In two days I'll be seeing it that way through my eyes. This film contains my favorite statement by a filmmaker about WHY one makes movies, or creates any kind of Art, for that matter. It's also a statement about why those who never taught TM will never understand those of us who did, and why they are incapable of fully understanding what it was like, because they never had this experience. Amélie is sitting in a movie theater, and explains in voiceover to those of us sitting in a theater watching the movie what *she* likes best about sitting in a theater watching a movie: "I like looking back at other people's faces in the dark." That's really it. You do what you do to see the look on other people's faces when they "get" it. Those who have never had that experience will never understand those who have.
