Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (35 page)

–Wall.

–An old man sitting very close to the window, mending a watch.

–Wall.

–A hand comes out, pulls Juliette into the room, and slaps her across the face.

Mme GRÉCO: I’ll kill you if I catch you doing that again!

Black screen.

15. INTERVIEW ROOM.

Bare walls. Short MAN in jaunty suit and polka-dot tie behind a desk, with papers in front of him; JULIETTE on a wooden chair.

MAN,
prodding the papers
: Your papers aren’t in order. What’s your
real
name?

JULIETTE: Gréco. Juliette.

MAN: You’re lying. These are false papers. What is your real name?

JULIETTE: My real name? Juliette…What’s yours?

Close up: the man’s face, his eyes narrowing, moves towards the camera.

Black screen.

16. PRISON CELL.

Juliette sitting on her camp-bed, her knees pulled up to her chest. Her face is badly bruised. (Film her in this position for ten minutes. Reduce to fifteen seconds with dissolves.)

17. FRESNES.

View of the prison walls from the road, as in scene 8, but stationary. Sound of rooks cawing. Five seconds.

Black screen, fading to light grey. Sounds of the city and the chattering of sparrows.

18. AVENUE FOCH.

JULIETTE sitting, clutching her knees, but this time on a bench, wearing a coat. She looks up.

Creamy mansions on the Avenue Foch and the tall trees in the lovely light of morning. Juliette, dressed as in the opening scene, stands up
and begins to walk along the avenue. Faint trumpet music. Passers-by look at her. (Do not use extras.)

(MUSIC: This should not interrupt the images but seem to accompany Juliette along the street: something like Miles Davis’s ‘Générique’–long, lonesome notes. If possible, show him the whole take, uncut, and get him to improvise.)

19. HÔTEL CRYSTAL, BEHIND SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

Natural sound.

Full-frame shot of the dingy hotel entrance: grubby, half-length curtains; dirty windows; bucket of detergent outside.

Zoom out: JULIETTE walks into shot. She stands looking into the dark brown interior of the hotel.

20. HÔTEL CRYSTAL, INTERIOR.

JULIETTE climbs the staircase (iron banister, brown carpet, embossed velvet flock wallpaper). The hotel owner (shirtsleeves, stained waistcoat) appears at the bottom of the stairs.

HOTELIER: Where do you think you’re going?

JULIETTE,
descending the stairs
: I’ve come for my things.

HOTELIER
disappears, comes back with battered suitcase; dumps it on the hall carpet
: There…

JULIETTE: Is that all?

HOTELIER: Hey! ‘Is that all’…Who does she think she is?…Try the pawn-shop…

JULIETTE
stares at the hotelier.

HOTELIER: What am I? A Sister of Mercy? You left without paying.

JULIETTE
kneels on the carpet, and opens the suitcase.

Close up: countless tiny moths flutter out of the suitcase; the remains of a dress are just visible.

21. STREETS AROUND SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

Long take: camera follows JULIETTE, who is carrying her suitcase. Rue Saint-Benoît, left along Boulevard Saint-Germain, past the church and the little park. People are talking animatedly. Three young German soldiers go by, looking like nervous schoolboys in their cheap wool uniforms. Posters have been pasted on the tree-trunks:
AVIS À LA POPULATION,
with
‘FFI’
daubed over it in black paint;
TOUS AU COMBAT! and LA VICTOIRE EST PROCHE!,
with a printed red band pasted across it signed by General von Choltitz threatening the destruction of Paris.

Juliette turns left down Rue de Buci and threads her way through the market stalls towards the building on the corner of the Rue de Seine.

Close up: the severed, golden horse-head of the
boucherie chevaline
next door to the hotel. A plaque beside the door advertises ‘
Chambres á la journée
’.

Juliette looks away from the head and walks into the dark hallway. The screen continues to show the hotel entrance for four seconds.

Loud explosions and shouting.

22. HOTEL ROOM.

JULIETTE opens the sixth-floor window, steps out onto the leadwork.

Rooftop view. Smoke rising from certain parts of the city.

Archive footage: posters being torn from walls; civilians in suits and ties carrying rifles; barricades; people taking cover in doorways; a tricolor flying from the Préfecture de Police, and the towers of Notre-Dame from a sandbagged window in the Préfecture; armoured cars racing along the Rue de Rivoli; bodies and debris lying on the Place Saint-Michel; General von Choltitz emerging from the Hôtel Meurice, lighting a cigar and having it crushed into his face by a woman in the crowd; American tanks festooned with cheering girls.

Rooftop view of Paris.

JULIETTE withdraws into the room and lies down on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

White plaster ceiling and light-bulb. Sounds of gunfire and cheering.

Ceiling fades to bright sky with white clouds.

23. JOËL’S APARTMENT.

Medium close up: a mountain of miscellaneous clothes.

Zoom out: a large studio apartment that looks like the property room of an abandoned theatre. Joël, a very tall, myopic young man, quite camp, opens the door
:

JOËL: My God! Is it really you?

JULIETTE,
smiling faintly
: I don’t know…Perhaps it is…Can I come in?

Joël ushers her in. They sit; he hands her a cigarette.

JOËL: Where have you been? No one’s seen you for ages!

JULIETTE: On vacation…at Fresnes…(
Silence
.) They took my sister. And my mother, because, you know, my mother liked adventures…(
Shrugs her shoulders, pulls on her cigarette and blows out a torrent of smoke.
) But she’s only my mother, and she always said she bought me from the gypsies…

JOËL,
inspecting Juliette with amiable distaste
: Yes, and she bought your clothes from the gypsies, too. I can see that. Now we shall have to see what we can do for you. (
Waves an arm at the clothes racks and the mountains of material.
) My family, too…Their business was confiscated, and now (
in a posh, 16th-arrondissement accent
) I have come into possession of the family fortune!…(
Pulls a green loden overcoat from the racks
.) The only problem is, they specialized exclusively in men (
arches his eyebrows
). It runs in the family, you know! But now that we’ve all been ‘liberated’, we don’t have to worry ourselves about such petty distinctions!…Here, try this on!

JULIETTE tries on the coat and shrugs it onto the floor. Then she explores the racks and piles of clothes, and ‘models’ various outfits: a khaki uniform, a black gabardine, which she takes off again quickly
after looking in the full-length mirror; then a hefty pullover and a large tweed jacket which she pulls about her and smells with an air of contentment.

(NB: this is not the Juliette Gréco of later years. She looks more like a chubby, street-wise teenager than a fashion model, but she wears even the most ludicrous combinations with a certain style.)

Two of her girlfriends enter and join in the fashion parade. Improvised, saucy conversation on the subject of men’s clothes. (Interview the actors; film in a single take, and edit out the interviewer’s questions.)

JULIETTE: I’ll never get used to buttoning it up the wrong way.

JOËL: You’d be surprised, my dear…

Juliette plunges back into the coat-racks. Before she re-emerges, the camera turns to the smiling faces of her two friends, applauding:

LUISA,
laughing, in mock-indignation
: You’re not going out dressed like that!…

24. PLACE SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

Two WOMEN of a certain age, swathed in funereal black, carrying handbags, looking scandalized.

JULIETTE and her two FRIENDS standing in front of a bar, all three wearing men’s jackets with wide shoulders, and trousers with the legs rolled up. Juliette begins to unbutton her jacket.

Close up: a pair of boots on display outside a shoe shop; legs walking past on the pavement. From one pair of legs to the next, the boots disappear.

JULIETTE buttoning her jacket over something bulky, and the three girls walking smartly away into the crowd on the Place Saint-Germain-des-Prés.

25. LUXURIOUS DRAWING ROOM, FAUBOURG SAINT-GERMAIN.

Ironic, light chamber music.

An elegantly dressed LADY in pearls and turban, looking supercilious but alarmed. Sitting opposite her: JULIETTE, with very long, uncombed hair, wearing a black figure-hugging woollen dress and the leather boots from the previous scene.

LADY,
to Juliette
: Do you have much experience in the profession?

JULIETTE: Oh yes, a lot of experience.

LADY: You have worked as a maid before?

JULIETTE,
looking around the drawing room
: Yes…Have you?

Close up: horrified look on the lady’s face.

26. STREETS AROUND SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

A wet evening; lights shining on the pavement. JULIETTE and her FRIENDS walk along, discussing films. The camera follows the conversation as though it is one of the group.

JOËL:…But it’s about a capitalist. It’s a glorification of America.

LUISA: Can’t a communist make a film about a capitalist? In any case, it’s allegorical.

ANNE-MARIE: So is practically everything!…Lang, Welles, Renoir…It’s all allegory.

JOËL: Allegory of
what
, might one ask?

They reach the corner of the Rue Dauphine and the Rue Christine, and stop in front of a bar.

JULIETTE,
looking up at the plastic letters above the entrance, ‘Le Tabou’
: It’s
all
real…And when you go outside into the rain, you start to fade away, because the film was more real than you are…

LUISA,
cheerfully
: Poor thing! She doesn’t know who she is, do you, darling? This afternoon, she thought she was a chambermaid…

JOËL,
pushing open the door, dramatically
: Scene Two: they enter a disgusting little bar called ‘Le Tabou’, where Joël buys everyone an exotic cocktail, and Juliette thinks she’s in Tahiti…

27. ‘LE TABOU’.