Sunken Rex

This is the Rex Cinema in Paris, a great slab of 30s art deco splendour. Thanks to Friends of Shadowplay Celluloid Tongue, Paul Duane and I heard about the tour, and decided to check it out while waiting to meet a contact concerning our top secret project.

What a wild ride that was! Like a very low-budget theme park ride based around the concept of existential nothingness, it produced a strange state of mind which Paul likened to coming down from a bad acid trip. A very specific bad acid trip — Brighton Pier in the off-season, with Paul Young singing his ill-advised cover version of Love Will Tear Us Apart in the background. I haven’t had that exact experience, but I have been on the Rex Tour, so I suppose I know what he means.

The ride starts with some gratuitous smoke and water being sprayed at the punters (we two had the experience all to ourselves, which added to the bleak hilarity of it all), then there was the first of several elevator rides. I’m convinced that none of these were real, but I suppose it’s possible that sometimes the elevators actually ascended or descended to a different floor. I suspect the ride MIGHT cover two floors. One of the effects of the ride is to produce a spiraling sense of dislocation, both physical and cultural (maybe if we spoke good French and had selected the French audio option instead of the lame American voices, the latter would have been reduced) as we were led through a maze of strange spaces which had some kind of physical connection, but certainly no conceptual one. The elevators were used principally as  holding pens — places where the punters can be forced to wait while a voice-over tells them random stuff, in order to pad the ride out to however long it is (as you take the ride, time seems to stand still, run backwards, then collapse in on itself like Mickey Rourke).

There’s a brief educational piece about the building of the Rex, hardly spectacular but at least grounded in something, though as the Tongue notes, the controversial and interesting bit about the cinema’s role as a soldatenkino (soldier’s cinema) for German troops during the occupation doesn’t get a mention.

Then it’s weirdness all the way, from looking through the windows of a dark projection booth to see a miniature mock-up auditorium screening Luc Besson’s THE BIG BLUE (as bad as ever) on a little video monitor doubling as the screen, to a dubbing session in which you attempt to fill in dialogue for a set of clips of old time movie stars (most of whom aren’t even saying the line you’ve been supplied with) — you hurry through to the screening room and you get to watch video of yourselves saying the lines — you never see the results of the “dubbing”.

The strangest moment is the “updating” — most of the clips on display are either golden age Hollywood, and a few French films, or else they’re 80s Hollywood. Apart from the terrifying apparition of a shop window mannequin peering from behind a dressing room door. This is a new addition but, obviously working to a tight budget, they’ve only given him French dialogue… oh yes, he speaks. He has George Clooney’s face projected onto what probably started out as Alec Baldwin, with an animated mouth, flapping open and closed in “synch” to the French script.

At the end of the show you get to watch a standing ovation at the Cesar awards, cunningly re-edited to deploy hidden camera footage of yourselves ascending a staircase, to make it look as if it’s you that’s getting the applause. However, since the tour is designed for a dozen or so punters, the staircase shot held for long seconds after Paul and I had trotted through frame, lending the whole thing a ludicrous yet stark emptiness, like a Three Stooges film made by Bresson.