Une Histoire d’eau

Homage to Mack Sennett, for Films de la Pléiade.

“Every year, the same thing.” The way to Paris is impassable, flooding. You can’t get there from here, and so you have a sort of déjeuner sur l’eau, jokes, commemorations, l’amour.

France is free nonetheless, in Paris, “Avenue Stalin comes out on Boulevard Nicholas II.” Baudelaire is the ideal poet. Aragon finds in Petrarch an art of divagation.

The Fordist and his passenger get here and there amid the waters, a man dangles his legs from a peaked roof, at last the Eiffel Tower is reached, the charming heroine reels off the credits.