Two brief map moments. A trip to Spain is planned by consulting a Michelin map. Earlier , in the bar at a motor racing track, there was a map-like element in the décor, but whether this actually represents the shape of the track I couldn't say:
On his way to the idyllic resort from which he plans to steal a diamond, the thief stops at P617, a filling station, and consults his map. The cover of the map is of the familiar, Michelin-type, but the terrain we are shown once it is unfolded is more strange.
'The upside down map thus, ironically, provides a “corrected” orientation. One of the words appearing upside down on the map is Carouge – a district of Geneva, but also by its obvious pun, a designation of something that is not on the map: Auguste's red jeep. This inversion of the map coupled with the code written upside down on the map and designating something that cannot be part of the map's cartographic function force us to think that Kieslowski's atlas in this film is going to be of a world “à l'envers [upside down]” and one whose itinerary must be followed by some other code that we must substitute for any known cartography.'
T. Jefferson Kline, Unraveling French CInema (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p.102. |
|