Joseph Ghosn
DINE AT NIGHT – Throughout the games, Joseph Ghosn has one mission: to tell you about Parisian nights. For the fourth stage, he tried to cross Paris by car.
“How’s the night going in Paris right now?” Having just returned from Scotland, where he was working on the whiskey’s next advertising campaign, photographer Julien Mignot, a loyal (un)traveling companion, suggests defying the inhibitions of the moment and taking a night drive through the capital. Nostalgia for Thierry Ardison’s Paris Derniere show. Not true. Rather eager to see how the night goes at this point as the opening ceremony approaches.
A priori, in the middle of the night, nothing could be simpler, more exciting than driving on the main roads of the capital. And Julien’s car is not just any car: Jaguar XJS, English driving, bottle green. A dream, even for those like me who don’t drive. Because this car has its own legend. we often saw it in the 1960s series, Holy, the flawless white color, and some boomers fondly remember the toy version. The Jaguar XJS is a childhood memory and a tale of the pop years. Julien dates from 1975, modified in 1992. But everything is as it was then, right down to the music we hear thanks to the radio cassette player, which now looks like the penultimate but sounds great. On the soundtrack? A cassette of folk and rock pieces put together for The Dreamin’ Man, a small coffee and tea shop run by Japanese exiles in Paris. On the tape, we hear the usual songs of this place, starting with the Neil Young song that gave their cafe its name.
Jaguar
This music is perfect for tonight. it feels like you’re wandering among California hippies, busy working on their most intense inner peace. And we need a lot of calm to imagine ourselves in another Paris, which is more out of our dreams than the reality of 2024, which quickly makes us realize that it takes a lot of patience to drive through Paris, even at night, even there. Jaguar, even with the Claude Lelouch film in mind, It was a meeting, in which the filmmaker filmed himself with a subjective camera, filming in sleeping Paris. Would he have succeeded in this same cinematic challenge had he been filming in the middle of the lead-up to the Olympics? We don’t bet. In any case, we clearly failed, despite the amazed and excited smiles that the car evokes in pedestrians. Several times the policemen on duty at the gates looked at the vintage car very amused. But each time they refused to let us pass the barriers. No doubt, above all, they wondered if we had confused the Olympics and the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
Through rejections and closed roads, diverted paths, we had to understand that crossing Paris was no longer so simple, and that all roads led us to the Bougrnel bridge, the only one open and almost usable. As you pass it, the sky is clear, you can see helicopters criss-crossing the sky. “There are so many at the moment,” notes Julien. “What can they find?” He is told that Paris is under high surveillance and that snipers are posted everywhere, especially in key locations. “Yes, that’s for sure,” he replies, “but do they also keep watch all night?” Move along, nothing to see.
Source: Le Figaro
