A week is a long time in terrorism. By the time this column gets published, most social media mavens would have found something new to outrage over. Our hearts bleed equally for all innocent victims in all countries, and we should not mourn only those who died in the City of Light on that fateful Friday, November 13. That said, for me, the attacks in Paris were personal, more so than the tragedies unfurling around the world in and around that day, because I have related to the cinema of France at a much earlier age than the cinemas of the other distraught nations; consequently, those images are seared indelibly into my conscious.
Jawahar Bal Bhavan, Cubbon Park, Bangalore, is where I first watched François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) on a grainy 16 mm projection. The spirit of sullen rebellion captured in the film summed up my adolescent angst perfectly. I was scarcely older than Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel when I watched the film, though I watched it decades after it was made. It is a different matter that I had little to fuss over, but hey, that’s the prerogative of our adolescence, isn’t it? I found out later that Truffaut had disparaged Ray’s Pather Panchali , but I easily forgave the lesser master when I discovered that he had recanted.
While Shammi Kapoor spouting gibberish in the name of French in Shakti Samanta’s An Evening in Paris (1967) was the cheap and gloriously Eastman-colour way to discover the touristy bits of the city, the pleasurable shock of seeing the same locations in wondrous monochrome in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960) was incomparable. The clip of the suave fugitive, Jean-Paul Belmondo, catching up on the Champs Elysees with his on-off girlfriend Jean Seberg as she unconvincingly but très coolly flogs the New York Herald Tribune , is one I watch frequently. It was, therefore, entirely understandable for me that in Kieron J. Walsh’s When Brendan Met Trudy (2000), the famous Seberg-Belmondo walk was recreated with Peter McDonald and Flora Montgomery.
There are plenty more cinematic memories of Paris, not the least involving Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider and some butter in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris (1972). The standout though, for me, is the mad dash in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), when Anna Karina, Sami Frey and Claude Brasseur try and break the record for running through the Louvre. In his homage to French cinema and the agitations of the 1960s, The Dreamers (2003), Bertolucci, rather than leave Godard’s cinematic holy cow alone, has Eva Green, Louis Garrel and Michael Pitt do the dash and break the record. The scene is also notable for being one of the few in the film, in which the protagonists have their clothes on.
Paris may have different significances for different people, but for me, she is all about her cinema. I have visited the city — both cinematically and physically — many times for this reason, and of course, to pay homage to Jim Morrison at Père Lachaise Cemetery. Je t’aime.