My love affair with modern French cinema started when I was a teenager. I used to go to an arthouse theater back home, and out of all the films playing, I chose Claude Chabrol’s “Night Potion,” which turned out to be nothing less than a defining cinematic experience for me. After that I watched the well known and charming Amélie, and a bit later “Before Sunset,” the second film in what eventually became the “Before” trilogy, which took place in Paris.
In retrospect, there were more successful films from that era that deserved more credit, but these were the ones that unfolded for me the culture of contemporary Paris and France, and from there I just wanted to see and know more.
One thing led to another, and in 2008 I moved to Paris to study film production. It’s funny to say that I came to know Paris mostly through those films, and like a lot of people, I pictured it as the glittering city of romance, dripping with desire, a shrine to bohemia with eternal chic.
Too bad none of the films I watched bothered to mention the boulangerie clerk who thinks her purpose in life is to correct the faulty pronunciation of her non-French customers, or the public transit strikes that are sometimes so unbearable they made me miss the crowded buses back home. And of course, the biggest headache in the French bag: the bureaucracy, which could easily fill a whole series of books on its own.
The Latin Quarter: A Clichéd Kind of Beauty
Another thing people don’t mention when they talk about living in Paris is how hard it is to find an apartment in the city. In the movies, the heroes always rent a place with a balcony overlooking the Eiffel Tower, but reality, as you probably know, is a bit different. How frustrating is it to rent an apartment in Paris? One classic French catch-22: to rent an apartment in Paris you need a bank account, and to open a bank account you need an apartment 🤦♀️ 🤦♂️
There are other strange requirements too, some so annoying that I sometimes wondered if the whole protocol was designed to discourage non-Parisians and foreigners from moving into the city. But stubbornness pays off, and I finally found an apartment in the middle of the Latin Quarter.
It was small and functional, but its real beauty was the view from the window: to the right, Boulevard Saint-Germain stretched out, and across the way sat a row of picturesque zinc rooftops on Haussmannian buildings. When I moved in, I was told the Latin Quarter was one of the livelier neighborhoods in the city. “Paris’s answer to a hip, happening boulevard,” someone proudly described it to me. Looking at the neighborhood, there is indeed a high concentration of points of interest: Boulevard Saint-Germain and Boulevard Saint-Michel, the Odéon neighborhood, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Mouffetard area, the banks of the Seine, and the Sorbonne, just to name a few.
But living in an area like the Latin Quarter is very different from spending a few days there as a tourist. First, it’s a relatively expensive area, even for locals, and it takes a fairly high income to live there and actually enjoy what the neighborhood has to offer.
So the only people who live in the neighborhood are bourgeois, but fittingly for Parisians, they’re chic bourgeois known as Bobos. The word Bobo is a blend of Bourgeois-Bohème (bourgeois bohemian) and broadly describes wealthy Parisian hipsters, worth a whole article of their own someday.
Around the neighborhood’s Bobos, a thriving American community has gathered, each person chasing the dream of being an American in Paris, in its bourgeois version.
A small myth buster: even though some of the Sorbonne’s most important faculties are located in the neighborhood, the Latin Quarter isn’t actually a student neighborhood, since the cost of living doesn’t allow most students to get by, or even to go out much. Most of the students who do live there come from Bobo families 🙂
In my opinion, the areas that are still lively in the neighborhood are Odéon and Mouffetard. Beyond those, there really isn’t anywhere you can go out to until the small hours of the night. Unless you know someone who knows someone throwing a soirée in their crazy apartment nearby, chances are that by 10:00 p.m. on a Friday or Saturday you’ll already be eyeing other, livelier neighborhoods.
Still, it’s a charming neighborhood, partly because some of its tourist attractions are also used by locals, and partly because it’s an old neighborhood with plenty of corners that reveal themselves over time. While wandering around the neighborhood, I noticed how many independent movie theaters there are in the area compared to other parts of Paris. I don’t just mean theaters belonging to big chains like MK2 or UGC, which are the local equivalent of a multiplex chain, but small, private theaters, some of which are considered historic.
The Cinemas of Rue Champollion
The place that drew me in the most was a tiny street in a central location, near Boulevard Saint-Michel, called Rue Champollion. The street sits on the remains of nearby Roman baths and has changed its name several times over the years.
At the end of the street, where Place de la Sorbonne stands today, there once stood a famous restaurant called Flicoteaux, mentioned in Balzac’s novel “Lost Illusions.” There, it’s described as an important meeting place for students from the Sorbonne and the local bohemia of the mid-19th century.
In 1867, the street’s name was changed for the last time to Rue Champollion (we’ll explain why in a moment), and toward the end of the century several cabarets filled it. After World War I, when movie theaters became popular, they gradually replaced the aging cabarets, and over the years no fewer than three movie theaters opened on the street. Walking past it, at first glance the street looks a bit run down and doesn’t catch the eye the way the two big boulevards next to it do (Saint-Germain and Saint-Michel). But if you look for a moment, you realize there’s a treasure here.
It took me a while to realize that the Champollion the street is named after is none other than Jean-François Champollion, whom I had studied back in high school art history class. Jean-François was the child prodigy who deciphered the hieroglyphics carved into the Rosetta Stone, which Napoleon brought to France as part of the loot from his plundering campaigns in Egypt. Champollion went on to found the entire field of Egyptology with his own hands.
Years after his death, Champollion became a street holding a true Parisian treasure: three legendary independent movie theaters showing films seven days a week, with three or four screenings a day. Locals don’t think of them as ordinary movie theaters, but as “arthouse” cinemas.
What does that mean? You won’t find new, commercial films there, but you will find retrospectives, screening festivals with appearances by acclaimed directors, special screenings of lost prints, and plenty of plain cinematic nostalgia. All in the original version, never dubbed into French.
Over time, the street became my secret corner, the kind everyone walks past and only a few people know what’s inside. But now I feel like I can share the secret and tell you what’s in there:
Le Champo – Espace Jacques-Tati
Le Champo was founded in 1938, replacing an old bookstore that stood on the site. The name “Le Champo” is a shortened form of the street’s name, and Jacques Tati’s name was added in 1988, since he was the theater’s most famous and significant patron for many years.
François Truffaut said Le Champo was his headquarters back in the day, and Claude Chabrol said it was his second university. In 2000, the place was recognized as a historic site and saved from a real estate deal that would have pushed out the cinema to make room for yet another unnecessary luxury store. The justification for its “historic cultural property” status is the building’s facade and screening rooms, which have barely changed since the place was founded.
Reflet Médicis
The theater replaced an old, famous cabaret called Théâtre des Noctambules (in English, roughly “the Night Owls’ Cabaret”), which stood on the site until the early 1960s.
In 1964, the cinema opened, modern for its time, with three screening rooms, each designed differently. Today, it hosts several major cultural events each year, like the Polish Film Festival, a retrospective of the “Un Certain Regard” category from the Cannes Film Festival, and more.
Across from the theater there’s a café with the same name, Café le Reflet. It’s a place where you can kill time before the film, talk it over afterward, or just sit and chat about cinema, or listen in on the filmmakers who stop by. The decor is distinctive, mixing contemporary art with posters of old films. Even the lighting feels like old-school cinema lighting.
Filmothèque du Quartier Latin
The place was founded in 1966 by two successful young bankers named Jean-Marie Rodon and Jean-Max Causse.
Jean and Jean met through work and discovered they had a lot in common: they were both named Jean M., they both hated their jobs, and they were both cinephiles. Together, they founded the independent movie theater chain Action, whose goal was to create theaters specializing in films of cinematic heritage (yes, the French love to sound dramatic).
Toward the end of the 1990s, the partnership ended for various reasons, and in 2006 Jean-Max and his son bought control of the Quartier Latin movie theater and added the word “Filmothèque” to its name, meaning film archive. Since then, they’ve run the lineup and the special screenings together, and sometimes you can still find them at the box office selling tickets themselves.
If you show up early enough for a matinee, you can chat with them and hear some great stories about things that happened there. The theater hosts seven international film festivals throughout the year, on top of its special screenings.
Visiting Movie Theaters: The Way to Really Get to Know a City
Now, some of you will say: why would I go watch a movie while on vacation?
When I travel, I always try to get a glimpse of the local culture. I’ve come to the conclusion that culinary experiences, museum visits, and guided tours give you that to some extent, but they’re missing a bit of authenticity, since they’re engineered to sell you the most appealing version of the city.
I realized that if you do everyday things that locals do, you can experience something deeper. My favorite everyday activity is going to the movies. Even the small talk with the ticket seller or someone in line can add real value, a glimpse into the unfiltered reality of life in a place.
This recommendation isn’t for everyone, and it’s definitely not for a first visit to the city. It takes time, and chances are you won’t walk away with a selfie for Instagram. But you will walk away with an experience, you’ll watch a film you never thought you’d watch (and enjoy it), and the brief interaction will leave you with a nice story.
So if you’re in the area, come for a movie or a coffee, have a quick chat with Jean-Max, and don’t forget to grab a stylish program from Le Champo.
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