3 Nights in Paris (Again)
The cheapest transatlantic flights to France seem to always land in Paris. So it made sense to spend some time in Paris at the beginning and the end of our trip. For the finale of our trip, we booked three nights at an Airbnb in Paris -- but this was no ordinary Airbnb. This was the actual studio of painter Georges Braque in 1911 which the host tastefully decorated with artists' books and period furniture. Located in the center of Quartier Pigalle, our home was two blocks from the Moulin Rouge (which lost its windmill sails just before we arrived) and steps away from the Rue Lepic and Rue des Abesseses restaurant districts. This is Toulouse-Lautrec and Amélie territory -- which is the center of Paris as far we are concerned.
After months of planning, we finally got to meet Juliette Dubois, our Cine-Balade tour guide. If her exhaustively thorough website is any indication, this woman is the real Ms. Cinema and I've been waiting to meet someone like her all my life. As the resident Paris film expert, she has apparently cataloged every single film shoot that has ever taken place in and around Paris and designed walking tours around those locations. What immediately caught my eye on her website was that she has industry contacts that can get people on actual movie sets during real film shoots. Does Michel Gondry have a new project and can I meet him? Yes, I did ask her this question and she had an answer for me: yes, but it's not in Paris. What about Luc Besson? No, he's been blacklisted and is no longer making films (okay, I made that up but it could very well be true). So I asked Juliette for a custom tour and put myself in her hands. I gave her the date, a list of my favorite French directors and told her to make me happy.
And boy did she come through. She started by giving us homework: a list of French movies to watch which I dutifully did. On the appointed day, we met at a designated location in Montmartre and Juliette took us for a four-hour walking "ride" ending at the Hotel du Nord Brasserie by Canal Saint-Martin where we ended up having a great lunch. Why this specific restaurant? It's also the title of a Marcel Carné film from 1938 which I have not seen and now have to hunt down. The restaurant was also an art gallery and tribute to set designer/architect Alexandre Trauner, an internationally renowned production designer I was not aware of. That's Juliette, always sharing, always teaching, always unveiling obscure secret spots for her clients to discover.
In between we made regular stops on a well-planned route, and every now and then Juliette would pull out her tablet, turn on her Bluetooth speaker and show us a clip from a movie. Whenever she did that, she stood at a specific spot facing a specific direction and as we watched the clip, the background behind us would come alive because we just happened to be standing at exactly the spot that the camera was facing when the scene was shot. Without fail, a smile would light up on our faces as our brain cells made the connection and suddenly we are inside the movie. This is movie magic in reverse, a brilliant trick that only a film connoisseur like Juliette could invent and monetize. I think she lived for these moments as she got as excited as we did as our faces lit up at the moment of recognition. She also had a story to share at each stop, usually a tidbit that only a true movie fanatic would know.
Here's the best one: on our stop inside the Gare du Nord train station, she showed us a clip from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America. It was the final scene right before intermission, a scene filled with heightened emotions. As Robert DeNiro and Elizabeth McGovern parted and her train left, Ennio Morricone's score swelled. Yes, we saw the track where this scene was shot, we imagined DeNiro standing on that platform on the day of the shoot. Then she played the scene again and zoomed in on the SNCF logo on the train. This was the logo of the French national railway. We were fooled! What we thought was New York City's Penn Station was actually shot right here in Paris. Apparently they couldn't find a train station in the US as grand as this one so they had to fly the cast to Paris just for this scene. Point made: this whole city is a film set, perhaps the best in the world. Yes, Paris is indeed the cinema capital of the world in more ways than one.
As Juliette shared her stories, I noticed that she has a bit of Amélie in her (not Audrey Tatou, but the character she played). There was an innocent obsessive quality about her when she gets excited and her voice rises. Juliette wasn't just a tour guide doing her job, she was sharing her true love for movies because that is what's in her heart. She treated us like kindred spirits -- movie buffs with the same passion, and we had a great time trading notes about our favorite films. Juliette also spoke excellent English, but with a charming French accent and some very creative word choices. I wouldn't have it any other way, her Frenchness just made the whole tour even better. Taking a tour with Juliette should be on every film lover's bucket list (see my Tripadvisor review).
One of the stops Juliette made on our tour was at the Cabaret Au Lapin Agile (aka the "Agile Rabbit"), a historic tavern dating back to 1869 when it was known as the "Cabaret des Assassins." Later, there was a period when the venue had a questionable reputation before transforming into an artists hangout when the “Picasso gang” arrived. And then Juliette uttered the magic words "and it is still operating as a cabaret today" and my eyes lit up. After the tour, I immediately went to their website and reserved a seat for that evening which ended up being the most memorable Parisian experience possible (for me anyway).
Yes, there are world-famous cabarets like the Moulin Rouge and Crazy Horse in Paris, but they can't be compared to Lapin Agile. Very few tourists frequent this place (90% of the audience was French and no English is spoken). The venue barely holds 80 people in a small room, a cherry liqueur was the house drink, and on this Tuesday night, the singers and musicians entertained the crowd non-stop for four hours until after 1am. The singers were talented, the atmosphere perfect, and all this would be a wonderful cabaret experience if taken at face value.
But that's not what I saw. What I saw instead was an extremely professional theater troupe mounting a well-rehearsed, interactive, site-specific avant garde theatrical performance. When you enter the small tavern-like room, you are guided to your seat and offered your first drink. As the room started to fill up, someone started singing "spontaneously." Soon others joined in and before you know it, you are now inside the play and you realize the singers are actors opening the fourth wall and inviting you onto their stage. The first songs were popular French songs and most of the audience knew the lyrics and sang along. Once the cozy family tavern mood was established and everyone had at least one drink in them, individual artists did solos, duets, spoke to the audience in character, joked, clowned and continuously engaged everyone in attendance. The best part: at one point, the waitress did a solo using her towel as a stage prop. Was this scripted? You bet. Was it improvised? You bet. Authentic or staged? It didn't matter, I was hooked. I had no idea what her song was about, but it sounded to me like her boyfriend had just cheated on her so she left him but now she wanted him back. She was so miserable that she just had to tell the audience and so she burst into song. Okay, I just made that up, but she was so good I teared up.
Or, here's another way to look at this experience. Imagine you are on a Hollywood sound stage. The set designer has built the ultimate cozy French tavern from the 1950s. Eight brilliant and talented singers and musicians have been cast to look like typical French folks from that era. The costuming, hair and make-up were perfectly convincing. The DP has spent hours fine-tuning the mood lighting. The cameras are rolling and the director yells "action." You are an extra sitting in the "audience" and once the action gets going, the director doesn't yell "cut" until four hours later. Yes, I was deep inside a Hollywood musical as an extra sitting literally four feet away from the singers. I didn't know an experience like this was possible, but now that fantasy I didn't know I had has been fulfilled -- in French no less. So Juliette did come through after all with my film set visit request. She had inadvertently fulfilled the fever dream version of my fantasy in vivid Technicolor (see video).
I did not think the Lapin Agile experience could be beat, but the travel gods had something else in mind for me. I have been following Jain on her Youtube channel for a while and managed to snag tickets to her latest tour. The last night of her four-night engagement at Le Trianon coincided with our last night in Paris, so it seemed a fitting finale for our trip to France. Jain is a French international superstar who has played Coachella and Lollapalooza. Her music videos are very clever and incredibly creative. She writes and sings in English (I'm guessing it was a smart marketing decision to do so). Then suddenly last year, one of her early songs from 2015 became the viral ooh wee Tik Tok dance trend and her popularity soared. I'm guessing the song's opening lyrics "Oh, oui!" morphed into "ooh wee" and another French idiom crossed into the international mainstream. So it was no surprise that tonight's concert was a standing-room-only sold-out show and her adoring fans (including pre-teen girls with their mothers) ate her up. She opened with her latest hit "The Fool" and followed with a crowd-pleasing set of her top hits. Unlike her early days when she was a shy girl appearing on stage alone with her loop box, she is now a polished performer backed by a seasoned band and knew all the tricks to engage her fans. Dressed in a Dior-designed dress and tights based on her own drawings, she danced and jumped and riled up the crowd to frenzied heights. In many ways, it was a perfect concert, but for me it will be the last one. I've already sworn off stadium concerts at $300 a pop (Black Pink). I've also sworn off first row pit access experiences (Bjork). Now I'm swearing off hot, sweaty, jam-packed, standing-room-only general admission fight-to-get-near-the-stage concerts. From now on, if I can't get a reserved seat, I'm not going. Thank you Jain for a fond farewell to a memorable concert-going era. I'm exhausted.
The next day, back to Charles de Gaulle for our Air France flight home. Once home, it was time to download our pictures from the last three weeks. There were of 2500 images plus some videos which will take days to edit. Oops, looks like we forgot to get one of the Eiffel tower. Oh well.
So what to do with all this French culture that we've absorbed? For one, I'll be in the kitchen trying to recreate some of the tastier dishes we ate. There are a few movies Juliette mentioned that I've got to hunt down. September will be a big month with a Tatiana Eva-Marie show in St. Louis followed by a L'Impertrice concert in Chicago the next day (yes, I've got reserved seats for both shows). Then maybe it's time to look into how to become a French citizen and move to France (just kidding).
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