My first encounter with this chemin de vert was through celluloid: it is featured on the walking route of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Céline (Julie Delpy) in the wonderful 2004 film Before Sunset. Lovers for a night in the Vienna-set Before Sunrise (1995), Jesse and Céline are reunited after nine years of what-if yearning. Jesse is in Paris promoting the novel he wrote about that night; Céline finds him at a reading in the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop, just across the Seine from Notre Dame. He has a brief window of time before his flight home, and they spend it frantically playing conversational catch-up as they stroll in “real time” from the Rive Gauche to a cute café, then along the Promenade Plantée, then onto a tourist boat ride which takes them back towards Notre Dame.
In fact, it’s an impossible route, requiring unwieldy river- and arrondissement-hopping. Not that I tend to bother about this kind of geographical license. I side with the great man who said that “realism is neither achievable nor desirable”; I want films to transport me, credulous and childlike, to their shiny invented worlds without fear of being held accountable to pedantry. But the impossible itinerary of Before Sunset interests me because it’s a film that take as its central theme the tug-of-war between romance and reality. Is the idea of romantic love (the protagonists wonder) just a con? Is there a God, an afterlife, magic in the world? How far have their memories been airbrushed and edited? To what extent does Jesse’s novel fictionalise their night in Vienna? Could their relationship survive outside the enchanted film-set cities of old Europe?
It is the film’s extraordinary emotional honesty that makes me more than usually interested in its mild topographical dishonesty – expedient when shooting in a busy city like Paris, but worth noting nonetheless. The film is both one of the most romantic I’ve ever seen, and one of the most naturalistic in its real-time pace and the artfully artless weave of its dialogue. These contradictions seems apt, though, for Hawke and Delpy’s indulgent conversation is forever going in circles and contradicts itself, working on the commendable principle that in real, lived experience we may feel two opposite ideas to be simultaneously true; that where fictional characters operate according to a cipher-like set of values or traits, real people are a mess of contradictions. Binary oppositions are for computers and fundamentalists; reality is analogue.
On the bright winter day when I first visited the real promenade, the faint absurdity surrounding the benignly Luddite idea of turning a railway track into a municipal garden was compounded by the fact that it wasn’t a chemin leading me to anything in particular. It was a film fan’s indulgent pilgrimage, requiring a metro ride out to Daumesnil on line 8, then a doubling-back on foot through a series of more or less connected walkways and parks: with a high-arching bridge here, and there a garden with a scarecrow and a vegetable patch, the walk seems for all the world to be analogue reality’s fey translation of a Nintendo platform game. At any rate, it had a rather lovely pointlessness to it, the pointlessness that defines both tourism and game-playing, with the accompanying arbitrary and linear objective that is equally necessary to both.
Then the miscellany of greenish spaces gave way to the stretch recognisable from Jesse and Céline’s wanderings, though with the chill air offering a bracing reminder that this was not cinema, and the bright sun showing the plants at their least verdant, and the un-cinematic graffiti and rubbish bins that I don’t recall from the film.
It would be churlish, by the way, to gripe about the ubiquity of graffiti in Paris. So much of it is brilliantly creative and bizarre, infinitely preferable to an expanse of bare brick or concrete. I have become mildly fixated with tracking down and snapping particularly striking examples, filling a wildlife-themed photo album with a safari’s worth of all the zebras, giraffes and unidentifiable chimeras daubed onto walls. It has become a further refinement of the game, a cheerfully arbitrary checklist and focus for my meanderings.
The graffiti serves as a useful shorthand reminder for the complex set of contradictions that define the city, a place marketed to the world as the home of elegance and refinement, but which also cradled a revolution and still regards May 1st as more sacred than Christmas. The irreverent scrawls on haussmannien walls are an important counterweight to the haute haughtiness. I get the sense that there is a stronger sense of an artistic underground here, certainly than in Britain (is it a coincidence that the phrase faire la manche denotes both busking and begging? It’s certainly possible to read too much into idiom). This despite, or maybe because of, the generous state support for artists (more binary-crumbling): indeed, it’s not always clear whether the street art has been done under cover of dark, or with municipal blessing.
Either way, it can only point to the Parisian tendency to aestheticism, the intolerance of bland functionality and the “digital” mindset. This is arguably the root both of the city’s peaks of beauty and its troughs of snobbery and stubbornness. It extends from the culture of restaurants and cafes to the architectural exile of tower blocks to the banlieue. And it could hardly be better expressed than by the decision to turn a railway track into a space for flowers and flâneurs.
