Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [33]
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top picks
PARIS FILMS
À Bout de Souffle (Breathless; France, 1959) – Jean-Luc Goddard’s first feature is a carefree, fast-paced B&W celebration of Paris – from av des Champs-Élysées to the cafés of the Left Bank.
Last Tango in Paris (USA, 1972) – in Bernardo Bertolucci’s classic, Marlon Brando gives the performance of his career portraying a grief-stricken American in Paris who tries to find salvation in anonymous, sadomasochistic sex.
La Haine (Hate; France, 1995) – Matthieu Kassovitz’s incendiary B&W film examines the racism, social repression and violence among Parisian beurs (young French-born Algerians).
Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows; France, 1959) – based on the French idiom faire les quatre cents coups (to raise hell), François Truffaut’s first film is the semiautobiographical story of a downtrodden and neglected Parisian teenage boy who turns to outward rebellion.
La Môme (La Vie en Rose; 2007) – biopic so faithful to the person and the time it’s as if Édith Piaf – played by the highly honoured (and deservedly so) Marion Cotillard – had just woken up from a long sleep at Père Lachaise cemetery. Incroyable.
Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain (Amelie; France, 2001) – one of the most popular French films internationally in years, Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s feel-good story of a winsome young Parisian do-gooder named Amélie takes viewers on a colourful tour of Pigalle, Notre Dame, train stations and, above all, Montmartre.
Paris, Je T’aime (Paris, I Love You; France, 2006) – an ode to Paris in 18 short films shot in different arrondissements (the 11e and 15e were dropped at the last minute) by different directors, including the Coen Brothers and Gus Van Sant.
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THEATRE
France’s first important dramatist was Alexandre Hardy, who appeared in Paris in 1597 and published over a relatively short period almost three dozen plays that were enormously popular in their day. Though few of his works have withstood the test of time, Hardy was an innovator who helped bridge the gap between the French theatre of the Middle Ages and Renaissance and that of the 17th century.
During the golden age of French drama the most popular playwright was Molière who, like William Shakespeare, started his career as an actor; Laurent Tirard’s 2007 biopic Molière is a fictionalised account of his early years. Plays such as Tartuffe, a satire on the corruption of the aristocracy, won him the enmity (and a ban) of both the state and the church but are now staples of the classical repertoire. Pierre Corneille and Jean Racine, in contrast, drew their subjects from history and classical mythology. Racine’s Phèdre, for instance, taken from Euripides, is a story of incest and suicide among the descendants of the Greek gods, while Corneille’s tragedy Horace is derived from the historian Livy.
Theatre in France didn’t really come into its own again until the postwar period of the 20th century with the arrival of two foreigners, both proponents of the so-called Theatre of the Absurd, who wrote in French. Works by Irish-born Samuel Beckett, such as En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot; 1952), are bleak and point to the existentialist meaninglessness of life but are also richly humorous. The plays of Eugène Ionesco – eg La Cantatrice Chauve (The Bald Soprano; 1948) – can be equally dark and satirical but ultimately compassionate.
Plays performed in Paris are – for obvious reasons – performed largely in French but more and more mainstream theatres are projecting English-language subtitles on screens. For information on theatres that host English-speaking troupes and/or stage plays in languages other than French, Click here.
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DANCE
Ballet as we know it today originated in Italy but was brought to France in the late 16th