Ahhh, Paris! How can you not love the City of Lights with its museums, its little cafés and its inimitable butter croissants? But how can you not hate it at the same time, with its grayness, its dog poop and its hurried residents? Inhabited by this love-hate for the French capital, where he lives part-time, the Quebec director Serge Denoncourt makes us discover a different and more authentic Paris in the new documentary series Serge in Paris.
“Paris is presented like a postcard on TV. The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, the good restaurants, the little terraces… It’s nice, it’s clean, it’s beautiful. […] But Paris is also gray weather. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it’s cold. Paris is traffic and the crowded metro, dog shit, sometimes rude people. It’s not an easy city, and I thought it was important to paint the most honest portrait possible,” Serge Denoncourt emphasizes in an interview with The Duty.
The title of the documentary series is also a dig at the very popular American series Emily in Pariswhich the Quebec director deeply detests. “The series shows a magnified Paris, which doesn’t exist. Above my house, there’s no sublime young man with his bare chest coming to borrow sugar from me,” he says with a laugh. His new Parisian apartment doesn’t have a breathtaking view either. In fact, it’s smaller and still not finished, with work having been going on for almost a year.
In the 13 episodes of the documentary series, we follow Serge Denoncourt’s installation in the 10e arrondissement. He shows us the “real Paris”, traveling — on foot or on his moped — the small streets of the capital in search of hidden treasures, which cannot be found in tourist guides.
To get help in his quest, he meets with Quebec and French personalities who live in Paris or are passing through. Each one gives his or her own recommendations. In the first episodes, the singer Pierre Lapointe introduces him to the little-known Musée de la chasse et de la nature, in the 3e arrondissement, the former director of dance at the Paris Opera Aurélie Dupont takes him to a vintage clothing store far from the Champs-Élysées and the author Dany Laferrière opens the doors of the Académie française to him.
Meetings
Beyond the good addresses, Serge Denoncourt and his guests take the opportunity to chat over an Aperol spritz or a strong coffee, seated at the table of one of the countless Parisian terraces.
“My favorite thing about Paris is the café culture,” he says. “You sit down with your date and talk, talk, talk. It can last half an hour or eight hours.” […] For me, the intellectual and artistic vitality of Paris happens there, on small tables of 60 centimeters. And that’s the atmosphere that I wanted to bring to the television with my guests.”
With them, they obviously discuss the City of Light, its good and bad sides as well as the clichés and prejudices that stick to the skin of Parisians. They exchange more broadly on the links that unite France and Quebec, on the values that they share or that oppose them. It is also a question of culture and the French and Quebec artistic community, Serge Denoncourt’s guests being mainly from there.
He hand-picked them all. “I wanted to talk to people who piqued my curiosity, who would bring something to the show as a whole and who weren’t just going to ‘plug’ their latest album or show,” he says.
Among the lucky ones are comedians Anthony Kavanagh and Anne Roumanoff, actors Magalie Lépine-Blondeau, Monia Chokri and Aliocha Schneider, hosts Jean-Philippe Wauthier and Stéphan Bureau, singers Pierre de Maere, Axelle Red and Daniel Lavoie. And, against all expectations, columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté.
“I really wanted to meet Mathieu Bock-Côté, because we are at odds with each other, I agree with him on almost nothing. But he lives in Paris, and he is an important figure. I wanted to understand why,” explains Serge Denoncourt. He makes no secret of it, this was the most difficult interview of the series. “He arrived with his speech prepared. It’s hard to get him to talk about anything else. He irritated me.”
As for his best encounter? Dany Laferrière, he answers without hesitation. “Our discussion moved me deeply,” he admits. At the heart of the Académie française, the two men talk in particular about identity, a discussion that made Serge Denoncourt experience a lot of emotion.
“I think that when you do a show like this, it’s always a pretext for meetings,” he emphasizes, presenting his documentary series more like a sociocultural magazine than a travel magazine.
Does he come out of it more in love with Paris? “I have a really toxic love affair with Paris. It’s true love, but I cheat on her, she cheats on me, she annoys me, so I leave her. Then I come back in a passionate rush, ready to accept her flaws, her whims and her diva sides. Until I need another break. I’ve been in this relationship for 40 years, I don’t think it’s going to change.”
The documentary series Serge in Paris will be broadcast on Fridays at 7 p.m. starting September 13 on TV5. It is also available on TV5Unis.