France
Shown in 1969
CREDITS
- dir
-
Robert Benayoun
- scr
-
Robert Benayoun
- cam
-
Pierre Goupil
- cast
-
Richard Leduc, Daniele Gaubert, Serge Gainsbourg, Monique Lejeune, Henri Deus, Denise Peron
- prod co
-
Opera-Lycanthrope Films, Paris
- source
-
Opera-Lycanthrope Films, Paris
-
COMMENTS
Robert Benayoun in person for New Directors series.
OTHER
One of France's most famous and widely read film critics, Robert Benayoun's initial move into filmmaking was a triumph in the Critic's Film Week at this year's Cannes Festival. Paris N'existe Pas (Paris Does Not Exist) exemplifies the personal poetics of Benayoun's critical views, and it is an elegant, absorbing experiment in describing the half-mad delirium of an artist's subconscious. Benayoun has always adored surrealism, comic strips, iconoclastic directors, cartoons and the comic style of Jerry Lewis. He absorbs all art forms and rediscovers their lost excitements, illuminating them with wittiness and unusual perceptions in the pages of Positif and France-Observateur. His stylishness is here, too. The film concerns Simon Devereux, an angry young painter, who is experiencing an uncreative, neurasthenic period. Through a series of weird hallucinations, he thinks that he is able to mentally travel back into time, exploring his own past, and sometimes the future. Both his mistress, Angela, and a rather world-weary friend, Laurent, try to wrench Simon back into reality; but it is useless. In a reverie of timelessness, the painter seems to discover himself in the world of 30 years ago: His apartment is haunted by a beautiful blonde phantom, still living amidst her orange walls, gilt frames and floral decor—like a Mucha mannequin. Simon is fascinated by this Proustian vision, and there is a chic, macabre mockery when this very modern aesthete, fresh from the Café de Flore, observes a superstitious spectra throwing salt over her shoulder. Living with coexistent girls, and exploring the streets of Paris with all of its tumultuous history suddenly alive again, according to his will, Simon experiences an emotional rush of love for the eternality of living—in cafés, restaurants, buildings, parks and the reincarnation of human types. Paris, with its defiance of tradition—or reason—its undocumented humanity, has an existence beyond measurable time. In his confrontations with this idea, Simon almost kills himself by yielding to le temps perdu; he sees himself as a part of Atget's streets, and listening carefully, the spectators hears, with him, the screams, the hummings, those thundering heartbeats under the earth.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #336
Bing Crosby was invited several times for an onstage tribute at the Festival, reports then-director Claude Jarman, but declined the honor. “Nobody wants to see those little things that I used to do,” he modestly replied. He did attend though, with wife Kathy and their friend, Rita Hayworth.
