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Friday, May 15, 2009

Rendezvous (1976) [NR] *****




Rendezvous (original title C’etait un rendez-vous) is famed French director, producer and writer Claude Lelouch’s 1976 nine-minute legendary mad dash through the early-morning streets of Paris. The dash across the capital started in Porte Dauphine with no regard for traffic lights, other drivers or pedestrians on the eastward journey to the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur. Reaching speeds of up to 145 mph, the driver has some very near misses on the way to the rendezvous with his girlfriend Gunilla Friden in front of the Basilique. The car used was allegedly Lelouch's own Mercedes 450 SEL, with the sounds of a Ferrari V12 engine dubbed later, although this fact has never been confirmed. Neither has the claim that it was Lelouch himself driving. However, there have always been suspicions that former Formula 1 star Jacques Laffite was behind the wheel.

This is cinema verité in its purest form: strap a camera to the front of your vehicle and off you go. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter what speed the anonymous driver was driving at - it’s the visceral thrill you get from watching (and re-watching) this nine-minute classic that is important. This is what cinema did in its very earliest days, when the sight of a train arriving at a railway station on the screen was allegedly enough to have an audience fleeing from their seats. We’ll never again be fooled the way they were but, by watching films like this, we can at least experience something of the excitement they must have felt as we see Parisian streets vanish beneath the bottom of the screen, hear the gears growl as tight corners and narrow tunnels are negotiated with pinpoint precision, see the obstacles provided by other early-morning motorists avoided by switching to the wrong side of the road and watch startled pigeons sent hurtling into the dawn sky.

Labels: action, auto-racing, Paris, short