It turns out she didn’t visit as many locations as we first thought. Most travellers whose city break destination is Paris would want to do the sightseeing tour and take in some of the French captial’s most celebrated landmarks. Of course, we did that too, but I also wanted to also visit the locations featured in the video clip made for Kylie’s Finer Feelings single.
The vintage music video is now 16 years old and has long been a favourite of mine, due to the romantic vision of Paris which it paints:
So compact is the city, it couldn’t have taken more than a couple of days to grab the shots. In the final edit, only a handful of places were used to tell the story of the song. Starting in Trocadéro and moving onto place de la Concorde, the monochrome film takes the viewer under the bridges and onto the banks of the Seine, and through the hilly streets of Montmartre.
We didn’t come to a conclusion as to which exact set of steps near the Sacré-Coeur were graced by the tiny Australian, though Rue Foyatier near the funicular railway may well have seen that overturned basket of shopping. But then, Rue Maurice Utrillo could have seen those tumbling groceries, too. There was also some confusion about which Metro station was captured in the video, as there are only a few covered ones over the whole of the Metro network. It doesn’t matter though, as Abbesses does a passable impression.
The only real difference between the Paris seen in the clip and the Paris of today are the crowded streets, full of both cars and people. Filmed early in the morning of February 1992, Kylie’s take on the city avoided the crowds altogether, and pictures a beautiful and atmospheric city just starting to wake. Although a little busier these days, both surprisingly, and thankfully, not much has changed.
Tags: France, Kylie Minogue, Paris