THE DAZZLING STORY OF THE
TONYSCOTT
(And why it's an insanely fabulous gem)
An Evening at the Gaumont
People ask me. That's the film that made me question whether I ever wanted to get pregnant. A film that terrified me. That shook me to the bone and left me standing outside the Gaumont cinema on Rue de la Gaîté, breathless, one hand clutching my crumpled ticket, the other clutching my guts. I was in my first year of secondary school. I still had freckles on my nose, scraped knees and vague dreams of being kissed on the lips. And yet, that evening, in that dark cinema filled with the smell of stale popcorn and teenage sweat, I realised that one day, perhaps, I would have to make a choice: live like them, or pretend to. Them. Those characters scorched by the Californian sun, those star-crossed lovers, those trigger-happy antiheroes whose bleeding hearts gushed torrents of blood. Thelma & Louise. Blade Runner. Ridley Scott was the meticulous architect, the sculptor of neon lights, the obsessive perfectionist who created worlds where every pixel smelled of rain and damp concrete.
It was magnificent, cerebral, clinical.
« True Romance. The film that cracked my skull open like a tin can. »
But what really swept me off my feet, what made me want to scream, bite and love with reckless abandon, wasn't Ridley. It was his brother. Tony.
Tony Scott, the bad boy. The one who filmed as though he were shooting up adrenaline, camera slung over his shoulder, slightly shaky, sweat dripping from his forehead, cheap hard rock blasting in his ears.
It was Top Gun, with its fighter jets tearing across the sky. But above all, it was True Romance.
True Romance. The film that cracked my skull open like a tin can.
The blood, the laughter, the flirting with death, the stolen kisses in the back seats of a Cadillac reeking of red leather and magic fairy dust.
Patricia Arquette as Alabama, incandescent, taking down her attackers like a warrior telling every last orc to fuck off.
Christian Slater, selling comic books one minute and becoming a gunman the next, through sheer chance and love.
Dennis Hopper, smoking his last cigarette before taking a bullet from Christopher Walken, who has better things to do than listen to a racist lecture about the origins of Sicilians.
« This TonyScott is a tribute. A scream from deep within. »
Tony Scott wasn't really cinema. Sometimes, it was more like advertising. But every now and then, once every two or three films, he'd manage to pull off an absolute gem. One that drove me completely wild, anyway. And over time, I couldn't help noticing that his brother Ridley had borrowed his rather flashy, slightly old-fashioned directing style, but with less flair and less finesse.
So this shoe, this TonyScott, is a tribute. A scream from deep within.
A way of saying that sometimes, you have to love fiercely, love fast, and to hell with the scars it leaves behind, as Francis Lalanne might so beautifully have sung. It's for all those women who live life at full intensity, who kiss too passionately, who run red lights in the middle of the desert and scream their desires into the night, their heads full of hair rollers. It's for those who know that love is a gun loaded with blanks. And that sometimes, you just have to pull the trigger to find out if you've got a chance.
