Content Fairy – Guy Redwood's Blog

The Movie: From the Porte Dauphine to Sacre-Coeur in less than 8 minutes in a Ferrari 275/GTB. Top speed in excess of 200. Count the number of red lights the car is running.

Early one Sunday morning in 1976, Claude Lelouch, the French film director best known for Un Homme et une Femme (1966), and other soft-focus romances with a distinct whiff of Pep? le Pew, took a 35mm camera for a high-speed drive around the streets of Paris. The result of this adventure, an eight-minute film entitled Rendezvous, has been the subject of amazement and speculation ever since. Did the car really blast from the Champs-Elys?es to the heights of Montmartre at 200mph? Was Lelouch behind the wheel, or was it the Formula One racer, Jacques Lafitte? And did the breakneck journey result in the director being propelled straight from the driving-seat into a police cell?

Background to the footage