RENDEZVOUS by Claude LeLouch

Back in 1984 a french friend bought a fiendishly fast KZ 1100 cc bike. We were sitting smack at an African transvestite after-hour bar in Les Halles, le Savanne. Dawn was an hour away. The streets of Paris were empty. Erik dangled the keys in from of my face. “How you like to take the monster for a ride?” My survival instinct had been rendered to zero and I took his keys. The pre-dawn streets were slick with winter rain. As high as I was my death wish was low and I drove the bike underneath Les Halles maze of parking garages. It’s been in plenty of films since then. I got the bike up to 120 kph on a straight-away. The RPMs coasted at 3000. A twist of the wrist redlined the dial. 160 in a second. I let up on the gas. This morning was not the time to die in a stupid crash. I returned to the bar at a conservative 40 kph. I had been gone five minutes. Erik with a junkie smile, “Fast?” “Very.” On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9. A friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drove at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris to meet a beautiful blonde. The film was limited for technical reasons to 10 minutes; the course was from Porte Dauphine, through the Louvre, to the Basilica of Sacre Coeur. No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit. The driver completed the course in about 9 minutes, reaching nearly 140 MPH in some stretches. The Benz was an automatic. Lelouch added the sound from a Ferrari to pump up the adrenalin. The driver ran about 12 red lights, nearly hit a few delivery trucks and pedestrians, and drove the wrong way up one-way streets without any hesitation. Upon showing the film in public for the first time, Lelouch was supposedly arrested for speeding, although critics have calculated that the top speed never broke 160. The same as me underneath Les Halles. The director has never revealed the identity of the driver, and the film went underground until a DVD release a few years ago. The title of the film is RENDEZVOUS. To see this short film please go to the following URL and hold onto your hair. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO8gMXrrESk