Visualize: a white Mustang crossed by a man, the surfboards of Deauville (Calvados), the beach at low tide, a woman. . . Understood? With around 300 films, the number of shoots in France has returned in 2022 to its pre-Covid level, demonstrating the charm of filmmakers in France. Of those films, some have left their mark on the city or place that hosted them.
It is these mythical shoots that documentary filmmaker Sam Caro (On Stevenson’s Way, 2022) has chosen. “We wanted to locate sites that were immediately linked to a movie. They also had to talk to as many people as possible. , between generations,” he explains. Eight were selected, all of them old, according to their criteria.
Starting with Deauville, the natural setting of A Man and a Woman (1966), passing through Claude Lelouch, with Anouk Aimée and Jean-Louis Trintignant. A dazzling start as, for the occasion, Claude Lelouch arrived at the wheel of a better reproduction of the original car, albeit more slowly, before speaking.
On site, Sam Caro discovered some privileged witnesses, who will share their memories with nostalgia but also with pleasure, such as the actors Souad Amidou and Antoine Sire (the two young men in the film).
In Wallers-Arenberg (North), a mining area near Valenciennes where Claude Berri filmed the 1992 film adaptation of Emile Zola’s Germinal, two former miners emotionally consult the cameras through the rubble of the mine. On the screen, we recognize Renaud (Etienne Lantier, leader of the miners’ revolt) and Gérard Depardieu (Toussaint Maheu). We track down the French actor (currently accused of rape and sexual assault), the evocation of Cyrano de Bergerac (1990), via Jean-Paul Rappeneau, filmed in part in the medieval center of Le Mans.
With the exception of Paris’ Butte Montmartre, which didn’t wait for Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s The Fabulous Fate of Amélie (2001) to become a tourist spot, filming is a blessing. On the Normandy coast, Villerville (Calvados), for example, does not skimp on symptoms and fireworks to remind us that here Henri Verneuil filmed A Monkey in Winter (1962), with Jean Gabin and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The same goes for Bergues, a little-known town in northern France until Dany Boon shot Welcome to the Sticks (2008): “Fifteen years later, 80% of people come to see the film,” says one resident.
The reminiscence is more attenuated in Rochefort (Charente-Maritime), the city of Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de. . . , (1967), with Catherine Deneuve and Françoise Dorléac. amazing teleportation bridge on which Gene Kelly and George Chakiris danced.
Ten years older, And God. . . Roger Vadim’s Created the Woman (1956), starring Brigitte Bardot, is still fresh in the mind. Two characters will then offer us a surprising adventure in time and in Saint-Tropez (Var): Simone Duckstein, 80 years old, daughter of the owners of the famous Bar des Angels Ponche, and Patrice de Colmont, whom we locate on the beach of Pampelonne, in Ramatuelle, an “inhospitable plos angelesce” where, in 1947, her father, ethnologist, He bought a cabin with no water or electricity, far from everything. It will be Club 55. Maybe that’s the magic of cinema.