C'était un rendez-vous

Hmmm.....I won the DVD of this movie - and I was totally unimpressed. Less than 9 minutes long? No cast? (Actually, there are a couple, but more on that later), no effects? No script? Come on, what were they trying to pull???!?!?!

And then I watched it.

Car lovers, you HAVE to see this movie. A break-neck drive through a 1976 Paris dawn in what must have been one of the fastest cars around at the time. All sorts of rumours surround this film - was the driver of the car a hired Formula 1 Driver? - having seen it, this would not surprise me.........was the director immediately arrested following it's first showing? Again, this would not surprise me.

No script, No effects, No editing - yep, it was all done in one take, and the DVD supposes a reason for this - and only the briefest appearance by "Actors" for the surprise ending.......and it is a surprise - not for nothing does this movie have this title...

Watch it if you get a chance, but not before securely fastening your seatbelt!!!!!!!!!! The kind of movie that Cine2000 and IMax were invented for.....

On second and subsequent viewings Lelouch's famous blast through Paris throws up more questions than even the reviewers here have come up with. It's obvious by the time taken to reach landmarks that the camera vehicle never exceeds the magic 100mph. Having experienced a similar drive through the streets of Sydney back in the 1960s (in a then just released Mini Cooper S) I know how fast one seems to be traveling when close to road level.

The speed or lack of it isn't the point of the film, though. It's the combination of Paris circa 1976 and the masterful soundtrack which to my way of thinking wasn't dubbed as some would have you believe. The exhaust note and a few missed gear changes seem to indicate that all is on the up and up; the Ferrari has such a torquey engine that it would have been possible to carry out the drive in top gear. Only in a few spots does the engine really rev high and it's always in the lower gears.

Rather than look for faults, better to just sit back and be treated to the best 9 minutes combination of sight and sound you may ever experience.

What I'd like to know, though, are there other films of this nature around?

This is perhaps not a film that I would recommend paying good money for; especially when you consider that A) it's only nine minutes in length and B) can be watched for free on various video upload sites around the net. However, as a piece of cinema, the experience is exhilarating. If you took the time to search this film by name, then I'd imagine you're already familiar with the concept; which involves a car speeding dangerously through the streets of early morning Paris on the way to an unknown destination. Director Claude Lelouch originally claimed that the film featured a Ferrari 275 GTB speeding through streets at 140-odd miles per hour, which is a brave feat, but one that has been proved as false over the subsequent years.

However, the fact that Lelouch was not driving the Ferrari and was in actual fact creating the facade of such an extravagance in his own Mercedes estate makes this even more successful as an experiment into the falseness of cinema itself. Through the use of sound and movement, Lelouch creates the facade of intense speed and real danger, as we view the action from a low angle camera attached to the car's front bumper as it twists and turns through narrow side roads and along busy streets, taking in the architecture and some of the major tourist traps on this breakneck journey through time. Naturally you can project your own opinions and interpretations onto it, seeing it as a metaphor for existence, of time moving forward to an event so fast that you cannot even comprehend how dangerous the journey actual is, etc, but for me, I feel this film is Lelouch's way of taking the ideas of someone like Godard to heart to show the natural facade of cinema itself.

The idea that the single components or the "how's and why's" aren't necessarily as important as the finished whole or the experience that they present seems to be the real point of the film. There's also the typically adventurous idea of cinema for the sake of cinema; recalling the ideas of someone like Werner Herzog, in the sense that there is no reason for doing anything other than the reason itself. C'était un rendez-vous (1976) is maverick film-making that represents the true heart and soul of cinema in the classic sense of the brother Lumiere, and of short films like The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (1896).

I just saw the Ralph Lauren car exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In the gift shop they had this movie on a loop. I'm ashamed to say I paid close to thirty dollars for a 9 minute DVD but that's a testament to how amazing this film is. Who cares if the car doesn't get into all 5 gears or that it isn't going as fast as it seems. It's still an amazing piece of film footage. Once you see it you'll know where they got some of the inspiration for the video games GTA and Midnight Club. I swear I've seen imitations of some of the footage in those games. This film should have been one of the ones mentioned at the beginning of 'The Player' where the security guy is talking about long single takes in movies during the long opening shot. I'm going to go watch it again.

I'd like to add, now that I've seen Ronin I know where Frankenheimer got some of his inspiration.

It's a typical take by Lelouch: the magic of cinema, surprises in the end, a "how they do this with a camera?"... If you have seen the Lelouch's short for "Lumiere & Co." it's the same thing always, it's a magician of nothing, but all that "nothing" is "brillant" in the way that he show it on the screen. A lot of thing, maybe it's not good at all, but we can't stop to see this movie, it's amazing, we are part of all the movie like in a "camera car" or "camera moto" (for me it's a moto) of Formula 1... I would like so much to see this short in a big screen, projected...

I think it's pure cinema.