Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (38 page)

22. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir selling
La Cause du peuple
, 1970.

23. The Arc de Triomphe, from ‘Le Plitch’, in
Mémoires d’outre-espace
(1983) by Enki Bilal. ‘The Government and I shall soon be in a position to offer you rational explanations for this delicate problem!…’

24. The Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre and the route of the Eurostar, looking west from the Col de la Chapelle.

25. President Nicolas Sarkozy inaugurating the ‘Historial Charles de Gaulle’ at Les Invalides, 22 February 2008. By Melanie Frey.

Po-faced
NARRATOR
of documentary sitting at café table: chequered suit, black-rimmed glasses, trying to look older than he is; waiter removes his cup. Narrator speaks to camera: zoom from across the street–vehicles and pedestrians pass in front of him in a blur.

Well, it’s not what I was brought up to think of as French literature…The only thing resembling an idea I could find in all this ‘philosophy’ seems to be this: we’re all free to do whatever we like…Well, then…(
Picks up the books from the table.
) I, too, am an existentialist…(
Stands up, tosses the books into a dust-cart, and walks off down the street.
)

Jazz music.

Blur of windows: camera whizzes back along the shop-fronts to:

33. CAFÉDE FLORE.

(Higher quality film stock, as before the newsreel.)

SARTRE, BEAUVOIR, DAVIS, JULIETTE. A continual stream of words. The conversation goes on, almost too fast to be followed, above the sound of other customers (including the director), the
garçons
shouting orders, twirling trays;
mobylettes,
car horns, police whistles, etc.

JULIETTE follows the conversation but also looks around at the other tables and the life of the street. Her silence and facial expressions area continual counterpoint to the conversation.

SARTRE talks with DAVIS in English. He speaks grammatically but with an atrocious accent. The cigarette is never far from his mouth. (No subtitles.)

SARTRE:…because your music has a political resonance…

DAVIS: I just blow the trumpet, man. I blow that trumpet and the sounds come out and the cats dig it…Or they don’t dig it; it’s all the same to me. (
Long fingers flutter
.) Politics is what I’m getting away from.

SARTRE: From my point of view, this is a political act.

DAVIS,
leans forward
: It’s just music, man.

SARTRE: Yes, jazz music, which is an expression of liberty.

DAVIS,
leans back; forced smile
: That’s a white man’s word–jazz. White men always want to put a label on everything. They’re just tunes, man. I take the tunes to pieces and I put them back together in different ways, without the clichés…

SARTRE: Yes, and then no one can hear the tune without really hearing it. (
Stubs out cigarette; taps another from the packet.
) For example: here is a glass. A glass on the table.

DAVIS
picks up his glass, drinks, puts it back on the table
: Uh huh.

SARTRE: I say, ‘glass’, and the glass is exactly the same as before. Nothing happens to it, except perhaps it oscillates, but not very much. It is as if the glass does not give a shit.

DAVIS: Heh! This is existentialism, right?

SARTRE: No, Gréco is
existentialisme
if you believe the
journalistes
. (
Smiling.
)‘
La Muse de l’existentialisme.
’

All look at
JULIETTE.
She watches a woman in Dior clothes walking past with a poodle, which lifts its leg at a tree.

SARTRE: This is not existentialism. This is a man who is talking to another man…

DAVIS looks intently at Sartre.

SARTRE: But when I say the word ‘glass’, something
has
happened. The glass is not any more in the shadows. It is not…(
looks at Beauvoir
)…
perdu dans la perception globale des choses
…lost in the global perception?…When I name something, this is not without consequence, which is what the man who uses violence–
la torture
–(
Juliette looks up
) what he understands when he forces another man to say a name or a telephone number or an address. (
To the
garçon.)
Oui, apporteznous une bouteille.
(
To Davis.
) This is why we can say that the writer and, in a certain sense, the musician, removes the innocence of things.

DAVIS,
laughing
: Yeah, that’s what I do, man, I ‘remove the innocence of things’!

SARTRE: So, for example, in the Alabama, the oppression of the Negroes is nothing until somebody has said, ‘The Negroes are oppressed.’

MILES
cocks his head; looks doubtful.
That’s a place I ain’t never gonna see…

SARTRE: Or, a better example: in
La Chartreuse de Parme
by Stendhal–
Vous la connaissez
, Gréco, La Chartreuse de Parme
?
(
Juliette smiles noncommittally
.) Mosca, le comte Mosca, is very worried by the feelings–the feelings he cannot define–which his lover and Fabrice have for one another. And he sees them go away in the carriage, sitting one next to the other, and he says, ‘
Si le mot d’amour
…’,
euh
, ‘If the word
amour
–love–is pronounced between them, I am lost…’ (
Blows out smoke.
)So you have, when you name something, a responsibility.

DAVIS
places his hand on Juliette’s.

BEAUVOIR,
smiling at Davis and Gréco
:
Oui, la responsabilité!
…But do you know when he said this, when Sartre said this, about
la responsabilité de l’écrivain
?

SARTRE,
emptying his glass, titters.

BEAUVOIR: He was invited to give a
conférence
at UNESCO. It was the first meeting of UNESCO, two or three years ago, in 1946. At the Sorbonne. The evening before, we went to the Schéhérazade, with Koestler and Camus. And Sartre–you remember?–danced with Mme Camus, which was like watching a man lugging a sack of coal. He was very drunk, and he had to give his talk in the morning, but he had not written a line.

DAVIS,
pointing a finger at Sartre
: The teacher hadn’t done his homework!

BEAUVOIR: Yes, and Camus, who was also drunk, said, ‘You will have to do it without my help,’ and Sartre said, ‘I wish I could do it without
my
help.’

SARTRE,
stubby fingers spread on the table, giggles.

BEAUVOIR: And then–he does not remember this–we had breakfast Chez Victor at Les Halles:
soupe à l’oignon
,
huîtres
,
vin blanc
–and then it was dawn, and we stood on a bridge over the Seine, Sartre and me, and we were so sad about
la tragédie dela condition humaine
–
eh oui!
–that we said we should throw ourselves into the river. But instead of that, I went home to my bed, and Sartre, he went to the Sorbonne to talk about
la responsabilité de l’écrivain
…

DAVIS: That’s cool, Jean-Paul. They knew you were talking straight because you hadn’t prepared…

BEAUVOIR,
shaking her head
: No, Sartre, he had everything already in his head.

SARTRE,
with his wall-eyed stare, purses his lips, looks serious
: What can we do? We can only try not to make ourselves guilty. That is what I said at the Sorbonne. It was after the Libération. (
The
garçon
arrives with the next bottle. Sartre fills the glasses. To Davis, suddenly
:) Why don’t you and Gréco get married?

DAVIS,
looking at Juliette
: Responsibility, man…I love her too much to make her unhappy.

BEAUVOIR,
to Juliette, smiling
:
Il vous aime trop pour vous rendre malheureuse.

JULIETTE
kisses Davis on the cheek. They look at each other. Close up: both in profile.

JULIETTE (
to Beauvoir
):
Il ne veut pas m’emmener avec lui aux États-Unis.

DAVIS:
Ayta-Zoony? Oui, mauvais, très mauvais pour les Negroes. Et très très mauvais pour les femmes blancs avec les Negroes.

SARTRE: But you can remain in France, where everybody loves your music.

JULIETTE,
to Sartre and Beauvoir, looking at Davis
:
Vous ne trouvez pas qu’il ressemble à un Giacometti?

DAVIS: Jacko Metti?

WAITER:
Je vais vous débarrasser…Vous allez dîner
?

BEAUVOIR: Will you have dinner?

DAVIS,
looking at Juliette
: No, we gonna find ourselves a bridge and look at the river, and then maybe we’ll jump in…Shit, I just came here to play music, I wasn’t expecting none of this.

A CUSTOMER
(the director) at one of the neighbouring tables, folds his newspaper, stands up and leaves.

JULIETTE pours some sugar into a cone of paper, reaches over and takes an empty ashtray from the next table, and puts both items into her bag. Stands up and takes Davis’s hand.

SARTRE,
to Juliette
: ‘Si tu t’imagines…’ You haven’t forgotten, Gréco?

JULIETTE,
leaving with Davis, looks back, shakes her head.

Zoom back: ‘existentialist’ young man in street looking into dust-cart, takes out a book and leafs through it. Walks off down the street, reading the book.

34. EXT. HÔTEL LA LOUISIANE, RUE DE SEINE.

Camera pans slowly from ground floor to top floor of the hotel–grimy shutters, window boxes, balcony railings. Pause at the top floor.

35. INT. HÔTEL LA LOUISIANE.

Hotel room. DAVIS in bed; JULIETTE sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking at him.

Silence.

DAVIS: She’s called Irene. She’s a good girl. I care for her a lot. But she’s like…She’s not like you. She doesn’t have your independence…She doesn’t have your style…I mean…

JULIETTE,
looking sad but not distraught; it is unclear how much of Davis’s talk she understands
:
Tu vas rester ici
(
pointing down
),
à Paris…en France?

DAVIS: I dunno…I could get used to being treated like a human being…He’s right, Jean-Paul. Everybody likes my music. But that ain’t good. Anything I play, the audience cheers. It gets so I’m not even sure it’s me who’s playing…But if I go back to the States, I sure as hell ain’t gonna find another woman like you.

JULIETTE,
getting back into bed
:
Tu reviendras un jour. Et tu m’enverras tous tes disques…

Mellow trumpet music.

The following sequence is an accompaniment to the music rather than the other way about
. (
As in scene 18, ask Davis to improvise–but without showing him the sequence. Show some of the unedited take of scene 31 along the banks of the Seine.
)

36. OPPOSITE THE HOTEL, RUE DE SEINE.

(
This is the same location as Juliette’s childhood home in scenes 12 and 14.) The view of windows across the street. Dissolves, showing sunlight on the face of the building, from morning to late afternoon.

37. PLACE SAINT-GERMAIN-DES-PRÉS.

JULIETTE and DAVIS. His arm around her shoulders–his tall body towards the camera, his face in profile, kissing Juliette. Her face, also in profile, her head tilted back, her body arched like a musical instrument. (Copy the pose from a Robert Doisneau photograph.) The spire of the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés appears in the background. The angle of the shot makes it look as though they stopped to kiss among the traffic while crossing the square.