C’etait un Rendezvous (“It Was a Date”), by French director Claude Lelouch, is a film equally famous for its authenticity and sleight-of-hand.
It’s one eight-minute take of a car driving fast through Paris one early morning in 1976. And a real thrill ride because what you see is… real: actual speed, actual people (no actors or extras), actual law-breaking and in all real-time.
But much of the legend is thanks to subterfuge on the part of Lelouch. For a long time it was believed that the car, which is never seen, was a Ferrari, in the expert hands of an unnamed Formula 1 driver.
In fact, the car was Lelouch’s own Mercedes-Benz 450 SEL, gyro-stabilised camera mounted out front; he also drove and had two film crew in the car. Sound from the director’s Ferrari 275 GTB (similar to the car pictured above) was dubbed in later; retrospectively, many “experts” say the soundtrack is not quite in synch, but it convinced everybody at the time.
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The F1 reference came when police apprehended Lelouch after the film screened; he didn’t want to admit he was driving.
Number crunching has since revealed the average speed on the 10.597km run was around 80km/h, but Lelouch says he did indeed hit 200kmh/h at times. And it was still truly dangerous: only two people outside the car knew it was happening: crew member Elie Chouraqui (now a well-known director/scriptwriter) at a blind exit with a walkie talkie, which broke, and Lelouch’s then-girlfriend Gunilla Friden, who appears at the end as the driver makes his date on time.
In a 2009 interview with Playboy, Lelouch admitted the film was a “moment of madness… The movie is very symbolic of my life. We did many forbidden things, as I did in life”.
It was eight minutes for a practical reason: that was the amount of film Lelouch had left over from shooting Si C’etait a Refaire (“Second Chance”), starring Catherine Deneuve.
C’etait un Rendezvous remains a constant pop-culture reference in movies, television, music and gaming. In 2003 Nissan produced a promotional film of the 350Z driving through Prague, to a rendezvous. An episode of The Grand Tour in 2017 featured a Bugatti Chiron speeding across Turin for a date.
Lelouch himself created a tribute with Ferrari and an actual F1 driver, Charles LeClerc, with an SF90 around Monaco on 24 May 2020, to mark what would have been the date of the Grand Prix if not for the global pandemic.
