You probably already know the film C’était un Rendez-Vous (“It Was a Date”), which has been passed around online forever—and via videotapes for years before that. There’s zero dialogue, the car is never shown, and the plot is nonexistent. But it’s a legend, shot illicitly in 1976 by Claude Lelouch on the open but uncrowded streets of Paris early in the morning at high speed in order to arrive on Monmartre while his girlfriend walks up the stairs for a hug.
Allegedly, he drove his own Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9, but the soundtrack applied is quite obviously a different car—it’s actually a Ferrari 275GTB. Like Climb Dance, a film about Ari Vatanen’s blast up Pikes Peak in a Peugeot, or Faszination am Nürburgring, RUF’s iconic film about its Yellow Bird, Lelouch’s eight-minute film is an important part of driving movie history.
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Ferrari, only incidentally involved in the original film due to the overdubbed soundtrack of Lelouch’s personal 275GTB, has hired Lelouch to do a sequel on May 24, 2020. It’s the date the Monaco Grand Prix was supposed to be held this year, but of course won’t due to the coronavirus pandemic. Instead of a Mercedes, Monaco native and Ferrari F1 driver Charles Leclerc will take the wheel of a SF90 Stradale, a hybridized, V-8 powered hypercar with 986 total system horsepower. Leclerc will blast through the streets of Monaco, which Ferrari promises will invoke the history of the famed Grand Prix race as well as the atmosphere (especially aural) of the original Rendez-Vous.
The new Rendez-Vous film isn’t the first re-creation of the Paris run. A few years back, Ford created ReRendezvous, a virtual-reality run featuring a Mustang GT, a sensible but less exciting version done without breaking any laws or speed limits. Ford, you see, got all the permits and so forth and did their version on the up and up. In the meantime, we’ll wait to see Ferrari’s new version—hopefully soon.
