The Seine

by Elaine Sciolino

  An adjoining barge serves as the chapel’s floating self-service laundromat, where visitors wash their clothes and hang them on lines on deck. Local shops and supermarkets donate food for the meals that the volunteer church staff members prepare, feeding as many as 130 people a day. No one in need is turned away. On the day I visited, four Tibetans were playing table tennis; they were not bargemen but refugees seeking asylum. “If people have difficulties, they can always find a roof and a meal here,” said Sister Marie-Rose, a volunteer from the Little Sisters of the Assumption.

  The Musée de la Batellerie (Museum of Barge Navigation) opened in 1967 in a nineteenth-century mansion on a hilltop overlooking the gentle landscape of the Seine Valley. Despite its small size, it is considered the most important museum devoted to the history of inland navigation in France. Among its treasures are miniature wooden barges, maquettes that explain the history of barge life, and a collection of old black-and-white photographs that bear witness to daily life on the river.

  The most impressive feature is a corner containing rows of periodicals that the museum’s Association of Friends publishes. One issue was dedicated to a bargewoman who wrote the following passage about her life: “To be a seafaring woman, you have to know how to read, write, count, swim, paint, varnish, run, jump from a boat onto land, eat in seven minutes. . . . You must be resistant to cold, heat, storms, humidity. You must have no fear of danger. . . . If you are sick or expecting a baby, your daily workload doesn’t change.”

  She could have been describing Arlette.

  A nineteenth-century engraving of a tugboat near Pont de Bercy.

  THE SEINE BASIN is still a transit route for more than twenty million tons of freight every year. But barge people agree that the life of the old-fashioned batelier is over. There are two different worlds now: the nostalgists and the futurists. For both camps, the changes are permanent—and pervasive. The isolation and loneliness that came from months on the water have receded, along with the kind of closeness that comes from insularity. Now anyone can connect on Facebook and communicate online. There’s even a blog for retired boatmen. “All the nomads are now in contact,” said Arlette. I couldn’t tell if she was celebrating a sign of progress or lamenting a lost way of life.

  Many of the old-timers and their offspring who are still working have moved on to navigating the big tourist boats of Paris. When I took a week-long luxury cruise on the Seine, I met Stéphane Humbert, an ex-batelier who has made it as a cruise-ship captain. He was a fourth-generation bargeman from northern France, near Nancy. From the ages of six to sixteen, he was forced to live away from his parents in a boarding school. “It was very, very hard, as much for the parents as the kids,” he said. “You did everything on your own from the time you were six. You washed alone. You dressed alone. You made your bed alone. You ate alone. To sleep alone—in a great dormitory with a hundred and fifty kids—was really hard. It’s like the military, except you are a kid. You learn to manage on your own very quickly. Otherwise you don’t survive.”

  When it was time for his much younger sister to be put into a boarding school, his parents could not face the rupture. They quit the profession, and his father went to work as the captain of a cruise ship. Stéphane followed suit. As a ship’s skipper, when he is called on to mingle with the guests, he wears a uniform that looks a world away from his difficult youth: a white dinner jacket, black serge trousers with crisp creases, a black bow tie, and shiny black dress shoes.

  There is a new generation of bateliers with bigger, newer boats and cutting-edge technology that navigates the river for them. They have one-thousand-square-foot living spaces with toilets and showers. “They laugh at the old ways of the river bargemen, even if they have descended from four generations of sailors,” said Miguel. “Their goal is to earn a good living, not to reminisce about the lives of their parents.”

  “Before, you had to know how to steer a boat,” said Arlette. “You had to know the interactions of the boat with the current, the wind, the height of the water, the reports from the bridges and the locks, as the ancients say. Even with artificial tools, we still had to ‘feel the water.’ We had to feel the boat. We walked with the vibrations. Now anyone can steer a boat, because there is radar and an engine in front and another one in the back.”

  These days, river transport is praised as “green.” Bateliers and environmentalists point out that it takes twenty-five fuel-guzzling trucks to carry merchandise that would fit on one barge. Paris proper is no longer the big working port it once was, but Haropa, the institution that governs the port complexes of Le Havre (Ha), Rouen (Ro), and Paris (Pa), is expanding and integrating its activities. Most of the growth involves “giants of the sea”—ships that each contain up to ten thousand twenty-foot containers, not barges. The goal is to make the Seine the heart of a transportation network that connects markets in and around Paris to more than seven hundred international ports. Increasingly, container ships deliver goods from around the world, including finished products like furniture, appliances, electronics, textiles, and toys.

  Paris’s main port complex—and the largest river port in France, with canals, loading docks, basins, warehouses, and quays—occupies 954 acres in Gennevilliers, just northwest of the city. One day when I visited, a multistory gantry crane moved brightly colored containers emblazoned with names like Hanjin, Yang Ming, Evergreen, and Cosco from ships to a docking area along the river.

  The Franprix supermarket chain, with financial support from the city of Paris, used a much smaller port area near the Eiffel Tower as part of its “Franprix Enters the Seine” initiative. By 2018, Franprix was moving goods for three hundred of its outlets in and around Paris via the Seine. That same year, the French transportation giant Bolloré Logistics, also with government support, launched a once-a-week, eco-friendly commercial-freight river shuttle between Le Havre, on the Atlantic, and Bonneuil-sur-Marne, southeast of Paris.

  AS THE BARGE WORLD changes, Miguel is rushing to preserve the past. Working with a filmmaker, he made a documentary about his family’s life. He had precious raw material: in 1924, his grandfather bought an early movie camera to record the everyday life of bargemen and built a darkroom deep in the barge he’d named Go-Ahead; his son Freddy, also a batelier, continued to film. They left behind hours of raw footage.

  Miguel screened the film, Aboard the Go-Ahead: Memories of Seamen, at a weekend festival in the port city of Rouen. It interspersed old footage with current interviews Miguel had conducted with his mother Arlette, Freddy, and Freddy’s wife, Marie-Noelle. “You always see the bargemen from the water’s edge, but never from within,” he told the audience. He said it had taken years to convince Freddy to turn over the footage and for him and other family members to share their stories. The interviews marked “the first time I ever heard my uncle Freddy speak to ‘terrestrials,’” Miguel joked.

  On the day I visited Arlette at her home, she said she took comfort in the fact that her barge had been bought by a person who loved it, that she hadn’t been forced to sell it for scrap. “To tear apart a boat for scrap is to tear apart the heart of the sailor,” she said.

  But she continued mourning the loss of her life on water. “In my house, I feel nothing, I hear nothing,” she said. “With the double-glazed windows, I can’t even hear the rain. When I was in the boat, I could hear the wind. I could hear the fish coming onto the raft! The landscape was always changing, the weather, too. There was the magnificent fog. I saw misty landscapes, the mist that formed tears on your face. It was fabulous. The boat was freedom.”

  Her voice trailed off. She started to cry. I reached across the table and took her hand. She didn’t pull away.

  “It is life, and we must turn the page,” she said. “But a house? A house is a completely different way of life, even if it is at the edge of the water. I do not have blood in my veins. I have water.”

  She teared up again. “When I die, I want my ashes to be put into a bag and thrown here, in the Sein
e,” she said. “Right out here in front, in the river.”

  Out the front window, beyond the red geraniums in the window boxes, is the Seine and the place where it meets the smaller Loing. A fitting place, I thought. A bend in the river. The river that had bent her, the river that had pulled her up straight again, the river that had never broken her.

  Actress Audrey Hepburn on a boat on the Seine while filming the 1964 film Paris When It Sizzles. © VINCENT ROSSELL.

  SIXTEEN

  Scenes on the Seine

  All Parisians know instances of

  serenity and grace: crossing the Seine

  and looking to the left and the right

  and saying to themselves, “Ooh la!”

  —CÉDRIC KLAPISCH, filmmaker

  IN THE FANTASY WORLD of film, it is perfectly normal for lovers to dance along the banks of the Seine. One of the most romantic dance scenes in movie history comes when Gene Kelly takes Leslie Caron in his arms in the 1951 classic An American in Paris and sings George and Ira Gershwin’s “Love Is Here to Stay.” Sixty-five years later, director Damien Chazelle paid homage to that scene in La La Land.

  In An American in Paris, Kelly plays Jerry Mulligan, an ex-GI struggling to be a painter, and Caron is Lise Bouvier, a young French woman working in a perfume shop. They fall madly in love. One night, he leads her down a stone staircase on the banks of the Seine. It is a pretend Seine, created by MGM in a Hollywood studio. The water is a few inches deep, and a painted one-hundred-foot cloth stretched around the soundstage gives the illusion that they are really in Paris. As the Seine shimmers in white and golden light against a midnight-blue sky and the backdrop of Notre-Dame and the Pont de l’Archevêché, Kelly bursts into song. They dance. They kiss. They walk arm in arm along the riverbank. The sound of moving water breaks the silence. Caron is involved with a man she deeply admires but does not love. She runs away, leaving Kelly behind. But as this is Hollywood, and Hollywoodplus-Paris usually means happy endings, they will meet again.

  Chazelle, who grew up in the United States as a fan of American musicals, loved the film and its daring, avant-garde experimentation with song and dance. He set La La Land, his 2016 musical comedy-drama, in Los Angeles, then inserted a surreal love scene in Paris. In the scene, Mia, an aspiring actress (Emma Stone), imagines what life would have been like if she and Sebastian, a would-be jazz pianist (Ryan Gosling), had stayed together. Mia wears a flowing white cocktail dress and high-heeled pumps, Sebastian a dark suit. String music serenades as they stroll, holding hands, through a tunnel onto the banks of the Seine. They walk along the quay, which is covered in a carpet of rose-colored leaves; they pass a boy in short pants holding a red balloon, a young couple on a bench about to embrace, and a flower seller handing a bouquet to a sailor—all of them immobile as if frozen in time. A river of deep blue and silver pebbles sparkles. On the other side of the Seine is a backdrop of Paris painted with broad strokes in a palette of blues, oranges, and yellows that evokes Van Gogh. They waltz off the quay onto what seems to be the surface of the Seine itself, an expanse of blue-and-white liquid light that blends into a dark sky with stars. It’s clearly fake, but it doesn’t matter.

  Chazelle told Entertainment Weekly that although he set the film in Los Angeles, he crammed “a combination of a bunch of things I love” into the scene—the look of leaves in fall, a clock set to midnight that recalls the 1924 French short film Paris qui dort, “when a magician casts a spell and the entire city freezes.” And, of course, the river, “which reminds me of An American in Paris, when Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron dance by the Seine.”

  Such a scene would seem ridiculous in most places in the world, but along the banks of the Seine at night, it looks just right.

  Paris is where the real and the imagined become serendipitously intertwined. More than any other art, cinema knows how to play on the myths and fantasies that Paris creates, capturing reality but also distorting, enhancing, and magnifying it. Paris’s City Hall is conscious of this power, and is determined to document, preserve, celebrate, and promote the city’s stardom in film. On any given day, an average of twenty films, documentaries, commercials, and television series are being shot somewhere in Paris, all with official permission. Even in the imagination, Paris, and the silver ribbon of water that curves through it, delivers.

  FAIRY-TALE ENDINGS just seem to work better in Paris. The French poke fun at American directors who make Paris-on-the-Seine predictably sweet. When Mission: Impossible—Fallout was released in 2018, the daily Le Figaro mocked the seduction scene between Tom Cruise and Vanessa Kirby, noting that it is set along the Left Bank with shots of Notre-Dame, the booksellers on the quays, and a barge “that passes by at exactly the right moment.” The newspaper concluded, “The cliché of romantic Paris that is much appreciated by American filmmakers still has a bright future.” But Cruise’s photograph made it onto the paper’s front page that day, with a story that ran two full pages inside, under the headline, “Mission Impossible Declares Its Love for the Capital.” Sometimes Parisians need the view of naïve outsiders to appreciate what is theirs.

  There is no official count, but probably tens of thousands of films have been shot in Paris or made about Paris. And just about every film set in Paris includes a shot of the river. “Anytime there’s an aerial view of New York City in a film, you see skyscrapers, and anytime there’s an aerial view of Paris, you see the Seine,” said Régis Robert, the head of research at Paris’s Cinémathèque Française. “Thanks to movies—especially American movies—the Seine is the best-known river in the world.”

  The Cinémathèque is a sculptural, limestone-clad space designed by Frank Gehry and located in the Bercy district in eastern Paris. Largely financed by the French government, it features exhibition halls, a multimedia library, screening rooms, and a world-class collection of films, photographs, costumes, decor, cameras, posters, scripts, drawings, and postcards. When I visited it, Robert and his team became my guides to the history of the Seine in film.

  In 1896, the Lumière brothers used the panoramic technique—the art of moving a camera along a fixed setting—to capture the grandeur of Paris in footage of the banks of the Seine, the place de la Concorde, the Eiffel Tower, and the Arc de Triomphe. The Seine became the ultimate testing ground for the panoramic shot. “The frame was always fixed,” said Robert. “You set the camera in one position and then move on a boat along the river.” Thomas Edison, who made motion pictures commercially viable, demonstrated the panorama effect to the world at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. His Panorama of the Paris Exposition from the Seine was a six-and-a-half-minute caress of the river’s banks filmed from a steamboat. Even today, one of the best ways for a tourist to film the river in Paris is to point a camera at the shore from one of the bateaux-mouches, which serve as grand, gliding dollies for millions of phone cameras.

  Directors just can’t stay away from some of the vistas. “You see the Eiffel Tower and the Pont Alexandre III bridge all the time in film,” Robert said. He mentioned a few movies with shots of the Belle Époque bridge: the 1985 James Bond thriller A View to a Kill, Eric Rohmer’s 1995 Les rendez-vous de Paris, Woody Allen’s 2011 Midnight in Paris, and Christopher McQuarrie’s 2018 Mission: Impossible—Fallout.

  I asked the Cinémathèque team to recommend a filmmaker or cameraman who could explain how to film the Seine. One of its members said, “There is only one person who understands the light of the river. Darius Khondji.”

  I had interviewed Darius, a French-Iranian cinematographer, a few years before, for a profile I wrote about him in the New York Times. We had talked in the kitchen of his eighteenth-century house near Saint-Sulpice Church, drinking espresso from white china cups trimmed in gold. All the lights were turned off. A dim light crept in from outside. It was too dark for me, just right for him.

  “I have always been sensitive to light, and I love to play with natural light,” he said then. “The light of the day. The blue light of darkness. The lig
ht of the city. The light of the seasons. Feeling physically assaulted by certain light.”

  His feel for natural light served him well when he was filming Midnight in Paris. He and Allen had a tight schedule for filming in the city, and it was overcast and raining much of the time. Fortunately, the two men share a visual sensibility: they dislike bright sunlight. “We went out in the street shooting, and it started raining, and we were chasing the rain,” Darius said. “We loved it.”

  The Seine bookends the film and moves in and out of the narrative. The story begins with more than three minutes of Paris in picture-postcard framed shots, as if the camera were making urgent, passionate love to the city from dawn to darkness. The Eiffel Tower, the Champs-Élysées, Notre-Dame, the red windmill of the Moulin Rouge, the staircases of Montmartre, and the Seine. There is no dialogue, just the soulful sound of “Si tu vois ma mère” by the late American jazz saxophonist, clarinetist, and composer Sidney Bechet. You expect the opener to end, but the images and music keep coming. By the time the movie starts, you are filled with an overwhelming longing to get on the next plane to Paris.

  In the last scene, Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), a screenwriter who dreams of becoming a novelist, runs into Gabrielle (Léa Seydoux), an alluring young French antiques dealer, on the Pont Alexandre III. It is night, and raining. “Paris is at its most beautiful in the rain,” she tells him. He agrees, and they walk off together. You are left with the impression that Gil will settle down in Paris, move in with Gabrielle, learn to speak French, and write great novels.