The cars that ate Paris

Peter Weir got his idea for The Cars That Ate Paris while driving through France in the ‘70s; the road signs he came across diverted him into what he perceived as strange little villages.*

Weir went on to make Picnic at Hanging Rock, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously. Then Witness, Green Card, and The Truman Show.

The filmmaker turns 80 this year. There’ll be tributes and a retrospective, for sure, and perhaps a remake of The Cars That Ate Paris, only this time it’s not a horror/comedy/art film set in a fictional Australian town but a horror/comedy/art film set in pre-Olympic Paris where the cars really are voracious.

En-route from Gare de Lyon, I asked our taxi-driver: when did Paris traffic get worse than Rome? He shrugged.

The pedestrians who crossed in front of us, and behind us, and streamed past on both seemed similarly nonplussed, probably because there were no moving autos to dodge, just a wedge of vehicles stuck at each intersection, noisy as a gaggle of geese.

C’est la vie, the taxi-man said when we arrived, three or four days later at our hotel in the Montorgueil, a stone’s throw from Rue du Nil.

We might have travelled to the Nile’s source in the time it took to cross a few arrondissements in Paris but, mon dieu, it’s great to be back.

*Rayner, Jonathan R. The Films of Peter Weir Continuum, 2003