This article is taken from the March 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
Park and fly
Some time around dawn on a Saturday morning, I found myself steering into a desolate alleyway in a bleak industrial estate near Heathrow. Here, Google Maps had promised, I would find the airport parking I had booked through British Airways. “Is this … real?” asked my husband as we pulled up outside a dingy portable office.
The inside did little to reassure us. The carpet was tattered, the wall bare apart from some stains and a single “Employee of the Year” certificate — from 2013. Beneath that sat a mini-fridge, its glass door so clouded with mould that it was (probably thankfully) impossible to see inside. Behind the desk, I could see three pigeonholes labelled “RETURNED”, “COMPLAINTS” and “DAMAGE”: the last two looked ominously stuffed.
None of this made me feel remotely good. But it was half an hour before we were due at the airport, and I’d already paid; time pressure and sunk costs can do a number on your judgement. “It’s insured,” I shrugged and handed over the key to my Mini before we were ushered into a battered people carrier to take us to Terminal 5. Our journey to Paris had begun.
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There are no movies about Paris in the winter, and no songs either. Three of our four days in the city were punishingly damp: this was not the time of year to be a flâneuse. But it didn’t matter, because our plans involved very little being outside. We had come to Paris to go to the cinema.
Various sources claim that Paris has more cinemas than any other city in the world. I’m not entirely convinced (more than Delhi? Really?), but I am certain that Paris has more cineastes than anywhere else in the world. The people here love films, and the streets bristle with tiny fleapits, each one running a programme of international revivals that makes your average British arthouse look woefully unambitious.
Even excluding everything not in English (my French runs out soon after “je ne comprends pas’), there were still more movies to watch than time to watch them. We sweated over the schedule with pen and paper. How many Hitchcocks is too many for one trip? Take a punt on something we’ve never seen, or catch an old favourite? And after a mid-afternoon screening of A Clockwork Orange, would we just want to jump into the Seine?
Tickled pink
At least we kept it light to start with.
After a quick stop at the hotel to check in, we rushed to the Latin Quarter for The Pink Panther — the 1963 Peter Sellers version, of course. Astonishingly, it was very near sold out. (For comparison, when my local cinema screened the 1953 French comedy Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot recently, about six people went.)
I could watch Sellers falling over things as Inspector Clouseau all day, but there are perils to enjoying a subtitled movie with a foreign-language audience. Because reading is quicker than talking, the French viewers often got to the punchlines before the actors did, leaving me sniggering into the void.
But not always. During the climactic scene at a fancy dress party, there’s a series of rapid-fire gags as Clouseau blunders into various guests. When he bumps into a woman in a Cleopatra outfit, she squawks “Get your filthy hands off my asp!” at him. Hilarious, but not in the French translation, which was a generic reference to un serpent. English is truly the mother tongue of innuendo.
Little progress for girls on film
Watching ten films in four days from the fifties to the nineties, you start to notice some trends. For one thing, “newer” does not mean “better” when it comes to women’s roles. Feminism had a rough ride in Hollywood. Sunday started with Hitchcock’s 1951 Strangers on a Train, featuring a plucky, resourceful pair of sisters who solve the mystery and save the (male) love interest.
It ended with True Romance, 42 years more recent but infinitely more retrograde. It has one significant female role, for Patricia Arquette as Alabama, a hooker with a heart of gold whose main function is to get brutally beaten for our entertainment. She’s great, but it seems harsh that actresses had to take the brunt of the backlash to female emancipation.
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We did do some sightseeing beyond the screen, including the Louvre — which I, naively, had imagined would be a pleasant place to stroll around for a couple of hours. Too late, I realised that the Louvre should be approached as a nation in its own right: it has border controls (a security line longer than the one at Charles de Gaulle) and its own baffling topography, not to be attempted without a map.
The next day, we went to the Monnaie de Paris for an exhibition of M.C. Escher’s prints. I loved being able to see the craft as well as the cleverness: a display of Escher’s tools alongside one of his original woodblocks made clear the delicacy and deftness of his work. But looking at his impossible geometries, I had one important question: did the designers of the Louvre use these as a blueprint?
Arriving back in the UK, I studied the instructions for car pick-up, which rivalled something from a Le Carré novel: call once on landing, once after luggage collection, and follow directions to the meeting point.
My husband looked sceptical about how this sketchy operation would turn out. So imagine my smugness when a busted-up people carrier stopped beside us, to deliver us back to the waiting Mini. Who knows, maybe the driver who took us was the mysterious 2013 employee of the year.
