Paris by the Book(38)

I was about to find out.

Ellie is the cameraman, Asif the offscreen, and quite anxious, narrator: Ellie, Ellie, I think we should go back. The streets wind and climb, higher and higher, until the ascent grows so steep the sidewalk finally gives up and becomes stairs. Ellie had shot herself an almost perfect noir film, the night blue-black beyond the occasional streetlamp’s glow. I was even a little jealous. All those years I’d dreamed of making films, and here Ellie had made one, if unconsciously. Asif plays his own role well: let’s go, he hisses, suddenly urgent, like he’d just seen something Ellie hadn’t. But they continue to climb the stairs. To their left, bricks, a wall, a building, buildings. To their right, perfect darkness. For a minute I thought it was a cliff, but then a distant lamp’s glow summoned trees, grass, a terraced park. Ellie climbs, the POV bounces, up, up, she turns to study the neighboring building, and Asif shouts. Squeaks, really. Brave Asif. The camera spins and two of what had looked like trees now animate, split, and become two men with beards. They walk up to Ellie and Asif. They smile, nod, and when Ellie and Asif stutter a reply, the men smile again and say bonsoir and disappear.

“See?” Ellie says to Asif on the film, and to me as I watched. “It’s not dangerous up there. It’s perfectly fine.” A moment later, Ellie urges them higher one more time—we’re almost to the top, and that’s, like, a famous shot in the film! This is when the rat (like all good movie monsters, it goes unseen) startles Asif, who stumbles and falls, along with Ellie, along with the phone. The last seconds of the video are shot from the ground, nothing visible but the flare of a lamp and the black sky beyond. The audio’s clear, though: Asif and Ellie swear and apologize to each other. There is a discussion of blood. Of glass. Of being out too late. I’m so sorry, Asif says, your mom’s going to kill me.

Ellie has the last words, before a hand crosses the shot to turn the camera off. She’s angry with him now. And by him, I mean her dad, but Asif is the handy proxy. Or I am: Don’t worry, Ellie says, she doesn’t care.

After Ellie and I finished watching, we fell silent. Robert’s manuscript took that family to Paris, no farther. There was, as I said, suggestion of a trip to Ménilmontant in its pages, but no actual scene where anyone in the family did just that.

“So there’s no reason to be scared,” Ellie said.

I shook my head.

“But you still are, aren’t you?” she said.



* * *



—

Nine months in Paris, and I had not been to the neighborhood where the subject of my abandoned thesis was filmed. Even though Eleanor recognized that I was relieved to be rid of the thesis—some part of me still burned to make a film, but nothing made me want to finish that paper—she would ask about The Red Balloon’s “backyard” occasionally on Skype. I had various ways of evading the question. I didn’t say that I was worried I might bump into Robert, though I now think that that was some irrational part of it. Another part was that I’d secretly been saving it up, the last chocolate in the box, because what would top it after? The movie of (and, my deluded self insisted, about) my childhood, come to life once more.

In the meantime, though, I’d fended off Eleanor with clever speechwriterisms. I wasn’t interested in the “real behind the reel” but rather the art, the film, the film whole and complete. If I wanted to see Ménilmontant, I could just press PLAY.

But now I had, on Ellie’s phone. And now I had to go.

Ménilmontant rises northeast of central Paris, between Montmartre and the Père Lachaise cemetery, but attracts none of their tourists. That’s in part because there’s little in Ménilmontant for les touristes, nor even for scholars and obsessives of The Red Balloon. A wide swath of the neighborhood, including the rickety catwalks that helped residents traverse the precipitous heights, was razed in the 1960s in an aggressive slum-clearing effort.

And so Albert Lamorisse’s film, shot in just two months at the end of 1955, got there just in time. To review: a large red balloon and a sweet little blond-haired boy (and briefly, a cat) meet atop Ménilmontant at dawn and then pal around Paris; some jealous bullies eventually hunt the balloon down and attack it with slingshots. The balloon sinks lower and lower, until one of the bullies finally puts a foot to it, and then the balloon lies there, crumpled and spent, just another piece of windblown trash in a vacant lot scabbed with dirt. Then comes the odd ending Daphne and I distrust, when the boy floats over Paris with dozens of other balloons that have rushed to his side, while the boy’s great love, that red balloon, lies trampled and forgotten. Lamorisse’s original script called for the boy to fly all the way to Africa. In the final cut, Pascal hardly makes it out of Paris, but still, the soaring mood is jarringly literal. To me, the film’s real, if unintentional, message is unnervingly dark: beauty is fleeting; jealousy kills.

It’s strange that Lamorisse’s film makes anyone wistful for postwar Paris, because he takes great pains to show how immediately post-the war still was: Pascal and his balloon are pursued over rubble-strewn lots and the rocky ruins of old apartment blocks; tufts of grass dot the earth here and there, but it’s no park.

A half century later, it is.

Some parts of Lamorisse’s Ménilmontant still exist, however, starting with the bus line Pascal (and the balloon) take in the film and which I took the next morning, after seeing everyone silently off to school. The 96 climbed steeply up and out of the Marais, eventually letting me off at Notre-Dame—another, smaller Notre-Dame, Notre-Dame de la Croix—which boy and mischievous balloon get thrown out of (by an usher in Napoleonic dress) during the film.