Nineteen

Filming had begun. It transformed my little cinema into a bustling, crazy, humming microcosm, a barely controllable, highly explosive conglomerate of snaking cables, harsh spotlights, rolling cameras and snapping clapboards, bellowed instructions, and tense silences. It was a world all of its own, which combined human vanity, heated rivalry, and great professionalism in the strangest way.

That Monday, when I climbed over the two rows of seats that had been removed and were now standing across the foyer, blocking the entrance, I realized that the whole place had been practically demolished. Massive changes had taken place in the Cinéma Paradis. Not even Attila the Hun had produced such devastation when he invaded the plains of Pannonia.

Incredulous, I came to a halt in the foyer, staring at the chaos that had broken out around me. A panting, sweating man carrying a cable jostled against me; I took a step back and almost tripped over the foot of a lamp, which began to sway dangerously.

“Attention, Monsieur! Out of the way.” Two men hurried past me, groaning. They were hauling a massive chandelier into the auditorium, and I tottered to the side once more, this time bumping into a human being—one wearing a floral dress. It was Madame Clément.

“Oh God, oh God, Monsieur Bonnard, there you are at last,” she said, gesticulating wildly in the air. “Mon Dieu, what a shambles!” Madame Clément’s cheeks were bright red and she seemed extremely worked up. “Have you seen what they’ve done to my box office? I couldn’t stop them, Monsieur Bonnard. Those catering people just don’t care—even though they’ve got their great big truck parked outside the cinema.” She pointed reproachfully at the box office, which was filled to bursting with cases of drinks, cans, and paper plates. On the wooden counter where the cash register normally stood, a coffee machine was hissing away. “I can only hope they’ll put everything back in order when they’ve finished here, Monsieur Bonnard. My goodness, what a shambles,” she repeated.

I nodded with a sigh of resignation. I, too, hoped that my little cinema would emerge from this hurricane undamaged.

“Have you seen Madame Avril yet?” Madame Clément asked. “A delightful person—she’s in your office at this very moment with the makeup people,” she said with a self-important expression. “And Howard Galloway’s in the projection booth, freshening up. He wasn’t happy about his part; he wants more lines.” She shrugged her shoulders. “I’ve just taken him a café crème; he takes it with three lumps of sugar.”

Madame Clément’s eyes gleamed, and I wondered how on earth you could freshen up in the projection booth. But I didn’t really want to know, and I stared at the caterer as he walked past us in his white apron, carrying trays of sandwiches and finger food in both hands to a folding table that had been set up in the corner of the foyer. A tall, almost bald man who was writing things down in a notebook made his way with all the confidence of a sleepwalker through reels of cable and amplifiers to reach the room that until very recently had been my office. Now it was the wardrobe area. I took a tentative look inside.

Dresses, jackets, and scarves on metal hangers were crammed onto a clothes stand. Peering behind it, I could see a wash basket heaped higgledy-piggledy with files and documents. My desk was bare—or rather, it had been swept bare. Now it was piled with hundreds of jars and pots, brushes and powder puffs, hair clips and sprays. And enthroned in the middle was a Styrofoam head crowned with a hairpiece. They’d hung a gigantic mirror over the desk, and I wondered for a moment what had become of the two pretty watercolors of Cap d’Antibes.

Solène was sitting at the mirror, her back to the door, attended by two women who were busily combing her hair. She didn’t notice me. No one seemed to notice me, except perhaps for Madame Clément, who had obviously become one of the crew herself.

I tottered into the auditorium, where the temperature was tropical, and had to shut my eyes, blinded by the lights. When I opened them again, I saw a big bearded man standing behind a camera, taking test shots with the lighting double.

“A bit more to the right, Jasmin!… Yes, that’s just fine!” The bearded man waved and checked the viewfinder once more.

A screwdriver landed at my feet. I leaped to one side and looked up. Vertiginously high up on a ladder were the two men who had just carried the gigantic chandelier across the foyer. They were taking down the old ceiling lights. The intention was obviously to increase the nostalgia factor of the Cinéma Paradis by several degrees of magnitude.

I looked over at the two front rows, where the seats had been replaced by cameras and gigantic lights. A little man in dark glasses was standing there talking very emphatically to a handsome man with dark blond hair, an aristocratic air, and a sulky expression, who later turned out to be Howard Galloway. The little man gave a friendly wave when he saw me. It was Allan Wood, my new friend, the man who was holding all this chaos together.

“Ah, Al-lang! Come here. Come here!” he called, beaming widely. “So, haven’t we done a great job on your little film palace?” He pointed up at the ceiling, where the oversize chandelier was now swinging dangerously. “Now it looks really old, don’t you think?”

Three hours later, the man who was holding everything together was nervously wiping his forehead with his handkerchief. His face was no longer beaming. His patience seemed exhausted. I’d been told that when you’re shooting a film, there are good days and bad days. And then there are the very bad days. This was obviously a very bad day.

“So let’s do it all over again. Concentrate! Three, two, one aaand … action!” shouted Allan Wood. He was standing behind Carl, the cameraman, watching the scene with his thumb under his chin and his index finger to his lips: It was the ninth take. It was supposed to be the first meeting of the main characters, Juliette and Alexandre, in the cinema.

A few seconds later, he waved his hand impatiently to cut the scene. “No, no, no, that won’t do at all! Solène, you should turn in a bit. And a bit more surprise, please. You haven’t seen Alexandre for years. You thought he was long dead. The way you’re talking to him looks like he’s just coming back from the toilet. So, once more … with feeling!” He wiped his forehead wildly with his handkerchief. “And the line is ‘I’ve never forgotten you, Alexandre,’ not ‘I’ve thought of you every second, Alexandre.’ Then look into the camera. Close-up. Cut.”

“Do you know what? I have an idea,” said Solène. She said it as if she’d just invented the formula for eternal youth, and everyone on the set raised their eyes to the heavens. Solène Avril was well known for having “ideas” that wreaked total havoc with everything.

Allan Wood’s right eye began to twitch. “No, please! No more ideas for today, Solène. I’m the director. I make the decisions.”

“Oh please, don’t be so stuffy, chéri.” Solène smiled winningly. “We’ll just change the whole passage. ‘I’ve thought of you every second, Alexandre’—that sounds better, don’t you think? It sounds so beautifully … intense. Let’s change it.”

Allan Wood shook his head. “No, no, that’s totally … I mean, that’s totally illogical. Don’t you get that?” He sighed. “You haven’t seen Alexandre for thirteen years, so you can’t have been thinking of him every second.”

“No, it’s Ted she’s thinking of every second,” said Carl, the cameraman.

Solène looked angrily at the big bearded man in the blue polo shirt. “Interesting! I never knew that you could read thoughts, too. I thought you only read SMS that were not addressed to you.” She pursed her pretty lips, and Carl looked grimly at the ground. “In any case, I don’t want any close-ups today—I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night.”

Carl narrowed his eyes. “That’s all that stupid cowboy’s fault,” he growled. “Why does the guy have to call in the middle of the night. Doesn’t he realize that the clocks in Paris aren’t set to Texas time?”

“Give it up, will you, Carl? What are all these constant gibes supposed to mean? Do you have a problem with Ted?”

Carl shook his head. “Not as long as he stays on his damn ranch,” he said grimly.

Solène laughed. “I can’t promise that, stupid. You seem to have done your very best to convince him that it would be better if he came to Paris.”

“Could you fight your private feuds later? It’s getting on my nerves!” A bored Howard Galloway glanced at his perfectly manicured nails. “I’d like to get on with it. I’m hungry.”

“Chéri, we’re all hungry,” said Solène. “And you’re not always the center of everything—even if you are, of course, the handsomest man on the set and think that entitles you to the biggest part.”

“Quiet! I must have quiet! Absolute quiet!” Allan Wood was rocking backward and forward and slipped something that looked suspiciously like a stomach tablet into his mouth. Then he held up his hand to attract everyone’s attention. “Now, pull yourselves together. Just this one scene and then we’ll have a coffee break.”

He waved Elisabetta over. The makeup artist—everyone just called her Liz—was a good-natured creature with a round, friendly face. You would have thought she belonged in a farmyard rather than on a film set. With a couple of skilled movements of her powder puff and brush, she conjured up a rosy freshness on the cheeks of the querulous actress and refreshed her lip gloss.

A few minutes later, they were all back in their places. Allan Wood gave a sigh of relief when, a quarter of an hour later, the scene was safely in the can without any more mishaps. “Okay, guys. Let’s take a break,” he called, sticking a final little pill in his mouth.

*   *   *

Solène already knew about it. She’d led me into my former office with a conspiratorial smile, pointed me to a stool, and pulled the door to behind us. Now she was sitting opposite me on her chair with a plastic beaker of hot coffee in her hands, and looking at me with shining eyes.

“Quelle histoire!” she said enthusiastically. “I mean, what a story! The owner of a cinema falls in love with a mysterious woman who turns out to be the estranged daughter of a director who’s filming in his cinema. That’s better than any film! Ha-ha-ha!” She laughed gaily.

I nodded, realizing with surprise how familiar this silvery laugh had become. Solène, this capricious, pleasure-loving woman of many ideas, was beginning to grow on me.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s really an incredible coincidence. Allan Wood’s daughter! I mean, you can’t make that stuff up.” My thoughts returned for a moment to the Hemingway Bar and what Allan had told me about Hélène and his daughter. “I just hope he really does find Méla.” I was quite concerned. “There isn’t a woman called Bécassart living in the rue de Bourgogne anyhow. I would have noticed.”

“Of course he’ll find her,” said Solène, twirling a lock of hair that had freed itself. Then she put her hand on my arm. “Don’t worry, Alain. He’ll find her. After all, we all want the tragedy to end up as a comedy, n’est-ce pas?”

“All?” I asked. “Who else knows about this?” Solène fiddled with her pearls. “Oh, just Carl—I had to tell him, of course; after all, we were once very close—and Liz. She’s really into complicated love stories and finds it all extremely romantic.” She smiled. “And so do I.” She looked at me for just a little too long, and I decided to change the subject.

“What was going on with Carl just now?” I asked.

Carl Sussman was an excellent cameraman who had won several Academy Awards. And he was also, if you were to believe Solène, the biggest idiot that the French sun had ever shone on. I already knew from Allan Wood that the bearded colossus simply refused to accept that the flighty actress had ended her affair with him and had turned to a big Texas landowner. But since the team had been reunited in Paris to start work on filming Tender Thoughts of Paris, the hot-blooded Carl had stuck to Solène like glue. He stole her cell phone, read all the messages Ted Parker had written to her, deleted them, and then wrote to the Texan, “Keep your hands off Solène, cowboy. She’s my girl.”

Of course the actress had explained everything to her outraged lover on his ranch in Texas and given Carl the tongue-lashing he deserved. She’d even threatened that she would insist on a change of cameraman if he didn’t control himself. But Carl refused to be impressed by her anger. He just kept saying, “We’re made for each other, corazón,” and threw everything into winning Solène back with red roses and passionate declarations of love. Carl was not a man to accept a refusal. He followed her when she went to buy shoes in the rue de Faubourg; he went to the Ritz and hammered on the door of her room in the middle of the night. And when she tried to get rid of him, saying, “Alors, va-t’en, Carl. Je ne veux pas!” he’d gasped a determined “Ta gueule, femme! Tu fais ce que je dis!” and kissed her. And Solène had shut up and let herself go one more time—one single, final time.

“Yes, well … Carl is a very attractive man, and we’d been drinking margaritas,” she explained with some embarrassment. “But did the idiot have to pick up my phone that night?”

When, instead of Solène’s sweet voice on the line, there was the deep bass of a man with Brazilian roots who had no problem with identifying himself and growled “This is Carl” into the handset, the result had been a transatlantic catastrophe of major proportions. It was the perfect storm. Carl was very pleased with himself, Solène was beside herself with rage, and the jealous rancher, who, far away in Texas, studied the French yellow press exhaustively to get some idea of what was going on during the filming in Paris, was deeply disturbed. Even when Solène assured him that it had only been the room-service waiter, who’d brought a club sandwich to her suite at four in the morning, she was understandably unable to convince her rather stolid but by no means stupid lover.

“I can only hope that Ted will calm down. He’s always so impulsive, you know,” Solène explained with a dreamy smile. She leaned forward and looked at me. Sitting there with her big blue eyes and her sky blue silk dress with its tulle-lined skirt billowing around her slim legs, she looked like an innocent Ophelia who had been deeply wronged. Finally, she gave a little sigh. “Oh, all these jealous men around me! It’s really too stressful, Alain, believe you me.”

Solène sank gracefully back in her chair and crossed her legs. Then she fluttered her eyelashes at me and gave me a challenging poke in the knee with her pointy blue fifties shoe. “In my next life, it might be better to try a sweet French intellectual. What do you think?”