the New Wave in Pigalle - La Vie à l'envers (1964)
Occasional visits by New Wave filmmakers to the Pigalle area are documented in section 3 of my post on 'The Grisbi Connection':
Alain Jessua's La Vie à l'envers is unusual in being a New Wave film centred in this area. The first recognisable location is the Place Blanche, where Jacques and Viviane go to the Moulin Rouge cinema to see an advertisement in which she appears, and then go to eat across the boulevard in La Place Blanche restaurant:
In this restaurant Jacques plays pinball, a recurring preoccupation that takes him at one point to a gaming alley full of pinball machines:
Jacques is an estate agent, and early on his voice-over is accompanied by a montage of locales across Paris: 'Saint Michel, magnificent 3 rooms, kitchen and bathroom; Convention, nice studio, space for a shower; Montmartre, 4 rooms, all mod cons, superb view...':
The last of these is local to where he lives and works, the superb view being of the Sacré Coeur's campanile:
The film's topographical centre is the apartment of Jacques and Viviane at 45 Rue de la Rochefoucauld, 9e. When Jacques goes to stay in the hotel across the street, we see him cross there and back:
From their apartment Jacques looks across at a woman in a room of the 'Savoy Hotel', and from his room at the hotel he looks across at his wife in their apartment:
When at the end Jacques is taken away to an asylum, we get a view down the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, towards the Rue La Bruyère:
When he leaves his place of work Jacques goes to a café two buildings further up the Rue de La Rochefoucauld, on the corner with the Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, no.57:
His place of work is in this vicinity but we don't see it from the outside. The first time we see him there the shot is immediately preceded by one of him turning into the building at 42 Rue Fontaine:
The Cabane Cubaine nightclub was here, andat the time André breton was still living in the building.
After Viviane comes to collect Jacques from work we see them walking up the Rue Fontaine towards this part of the street, so there isn't any exact topographical logic to these views.
After Viviane comes to collect Jacques from work we see them walking up the Rue Fontaine towards this part of the street, so there isn't any exact topographical logic to these views.
Jacques vists a friend who is a gymnastics trainer at the Gymnnase Pigalle, 3 Cité du Midi, which is off the Boulevard de Clichy at no. 50:
Jacques and Viviane get married at the Mairie du 18e, Place Jules Joffrin:
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In a rare departure from the Pigalle-Montmartre locality, the meal after the wedding is in a Brasserie Alsacienne on the Rue Saint Paul, 4e. We are meant, I think, to think that they are still somewhere in the 9e or 18e, since when Jacques and Viviane leave the restaurant they are immediately on the Place Blanche, heading along the Boulevard de Clichy:
They go into a diner at 78 Boulevard de Clichy, and then into the Comoedia cinema at 47 Boulevard de Clichy, where the film playing is Piero Regnoli's L'Ultima preda del vampiro (1960), known in French as Des filles pour un vampire and in English as The Vampire's Last Fling:
And then they are window-shopping on three different streets, the first of them the Champs Elysées, but I haven't identified the other two:
They cross the Place Pigalle and then are in the Brasserie de la Cigale, a jazz club at 124 Boulevard de Rochechouart:
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Not wanting to go home, Jacques takes Viviane to a hotel by the Place Pigalle:
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The Café des Omnibus, above right, appears again when, later, Jacques goes out one morning and sits at this café's terrace, contemplating the view opposite:
The building with the café is curved, and the building he contemplates is curved, and the suggestion is that the Place Pigalle is circular. This is a false impression, since the building opposite the Café des Omnibus is not curved. The one we see in the film is about 0.5km further along, at 19 Boulevard de Rochechouart:
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After this point Jacques's wanderings around Paris are diverse. He studies a tree in the Bois de Vincennes, he stares at a man on the Métro, he reads the small ads posted outside the Figaro offices on the Champs Elysées, :
