je ne manque pas de bonnes raisons pour t'aimer

It's high time I finished what I started almost two months ago and worked out how to tie up this blog and my last couple of days in Paris. This morning I found my red Dorothy shoes under my bed and felt hugely guilty for abandoning this blog at the final frontier: home. Which reminds me, before anything more is said, this whole thing had a happy ending because on my last night with my U-dub friends, after Rock en Seine, we went back to the bar in Montparnasse, which we still can't remember the name of, and I found my black ballet pumps. I screamed about this for about two hours and immediately replaced my horrible trainers with them. Then I spent an hour talking to a fireman about car fires in the banlieue. Funnnnn.

The next day I visited Joel and the room was half-emptied, as Cameron had moved out the night before. It was so weird without half the stuff there, the collection of empties finally binned, the basketball laboriously deflated. We went to the brasserie with Sean, where we had hung out on the first day, and drank ice tea and they talked about technology, because let's not get soppy now. Joel had to catch his bus, so he could be super early for his flight to Sweden and Sean and I took a very long, slightly risky bus journey to the Louvre, where we explored the medieval foundations, and where I took the picture of these dice, which were used a rubble for the next palace and only collected in the Mitterand excavation and renovation project of the eighties.

After this I realised I had a lot to cram in before I left. I have recently become obsessed with the soundtrack of Les Chansons d'amour, a film starring none other than...Louis Garrel. You can listen to most of the songs online, although the CD itself is almost impossible to track down, and I couldn't find it in Gibert Jeune. If by some unlikely turn of events you have to queue at a listening post in FNAC on your lunch hour to hear it, you really should. My favourite song from the film is definitely "Je n'aime que toi," sung by all three of the main characters, who are in a strange, three-way relationship that at least one of them isn't happy about. The particularly clever part is sung by the second girl in the relationship, expressing her role in quintessentially Parisian terms, with all the perversity you can expect of a Garrel film:

Je suis le pont sur la rivière

Qui va de toi a toi

Traversez-moi, la belle affaire!

Embrassez-vous sur moi hmmm hmm

Je n'aime que toi hmm

Je n'aime que toi

and then later, she becomes even more obstinately architectural to the romance:

Je suis le pont sur la rivière

Vos guerres me laissent de bois

Piétinez-moi, que puis-je y faire

Je ne bouge pas de là, la la, la la

Je n'aime que toi, la la la la la

Je n'aime que toi, la la la la la

Je n'aime que toi, la la la la la

Je n'aime que toi

I was excited about seeing the film as I loved the songs so much and just couldn't imagine Garrel doing a musical. In fact the clips of the film I had seen were more like music videos, not excerpts from a musical and the whole thing it seemed aspired to operate on assumptions very different from the usual all-singing all-dancing production (actually you don't get much dancing in Chansons, just some terrific smoke rings and inspired choreographed-yoga). Also exciting was that I'd heard reviews as damning as:

You need a sweet tooth for this kind of thing and Garrel really is turning into the most irritating actor in the world, hyperactively clowning around and generally behaving like the Big Brother contestant from hell.

from Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian.

I decided this was an occasion on which to dress up for the cinema - they all are, but especially so when you've been looking forward to it this much and you're going alone - so I put on my new breton top, blue jeans and an enormous cream cardigan, and set out for Le Brady L'Albatros. This had acheived almost pilgrimage-like destination status in my mind by the end of the week as I realised that the film actually centres around this very cinema, and you can see it in the opening shot, left. Not only this but I had the delicious joy of mentally caterwauling the lyrics of the film's final song, "J'ai Cru Entendre," the whole tube ride there, as I too made my way "de Montparnaaaaasse...à...Chateau d'eaaaauuu."

As usual there were three other people in the room, possibly the smallest movie theatre I have ever seen, with maybe twelve seats, and the lights were on right up until the feature started rolling, recalling the unnatural starkness of a night club just before closing. The first few scenes, however were glorious, although the imitation of Umbrellas of Cherbourg with the chapter divisions required the taking of a deep breath. After a while it seemed to stray a bit, as though someone had found twelve or so excellent music videos and tried to think up some dialogue and weird sexual situations to place them context and link them all up. I can't disagree with Peter Bradshaw on Garrel's mime scenes either - they went on forever and were distinctly irrelevant, although he personally couldn't help that. What I did like about the film was the ending, where the two male leads end up on the roof, at the end of the song and the exhaustion of what had seemed a self-indulgent and cruel hit-parade of emotional experimentation is revealed in a classic last line -

Aime-moi moins, mais aime-moi longtemps

Whoever said films are written with words like "wooosh!" and "zoom!" was wrong. Meanwhile it was coming up to my last day, which I spent entirely at the Cinemathèque Française finally. You can spend forever in there going from floor to floor. I spent most of my time in their history of film exhibition, where you can see everything contributing to the birth of cinema, like magic lanterns, and all sorts of phantasmagoria, as well as the earliest faking of colour film, Lois Fuller dancing, the head from Psycho and props from Metropolis and Un Chien Andalou. There's also a really nice park with a strange flying saucer like sports centre dedicated to some prime minister or other opposite. I was a bit disappointed to find that the collection has been moved since the sixties, although maybe not so worried that the line that's been in my heads for several years no longer applied - "only the French would house a cinema inside a palace." It's better as poetic licence.