“I love French cinema,” says Jamie Muir, “both new and old. It’s so beautiful and … what’s the word? Poetic, I guess.” Appropriately, the spirit of je ne sais quoi figures prominently in Muir’s short film Le Baiser (The Kiss), a sensual, romantic romp made exclusively for coffee brand Carte Noire and inspired by the famous photograph taken by Robert Doisneau in 1950 for Life magazine – titled Le baiser de l’Hôtel de Ville – of a young man impulsively kissing his girlfriend in a busy street.
Starring up and coming actors Mathilde Warner and Nicolas Portier, Muir’s film specifically pays tribute to the New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) revolution of the late 50s and 60s, when directors such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and Jacques Rivette reinvented film grammar by throwing out the rulebook and simply chasing the moment.
“Intensity was really our buzzword,” Muir recalls. “Intensity and passion are two things we felt Carte Noire embodies, which needed to be encapsulated in the physical and emotional chemistry between the actors.”
Muir speaks exuberantly about the mechanics of New Wave, about the jump cuts, the zooms and the freedom one gets from shooting in 16mm with a hand-held camera: “To me, it feels very full of life,” he says. “When you make films on a daily basis, you’re always trying to capture a perfect moment, but this way of working flips that on its head, in a way. It’s about taking things back to the bare bones. Being very run-and-gun, finding the emotion and feeling of the scene. I guess it means very free-spirited filmmaking. But at the same time, we wanted to give it a quirkier feel – not just New Wave, but also drawing inspiration from directors like Wes Anderson by creating comedy in the framing.”
For full authenticity, Muir knew that there could be no compromises, an approach he described as “very liberating.”
“If we wanted to pull it off … we needed to do it properly, which meant going to Paris, shooting in 16mm and really embracing the New Wave era.”
“Not knowing what was going to happen was part of the fun,” he says. “I mean, we didn’t know which bridges we were going to film on, we just went out into the streets and started filming. And we were very lucky with the sun. It gave us the look we wanted.”
And that look was? He laughs, before summing it neatly: “Summer in Paris!”
