M E T R O F A L L

James Bond can fall from the sky? What a novice! Your cinema blogger can do so much better: she can fall from the stairs of an underground station. Without using a double, of course. 

Pity I wasn’t playing in any movie…
This is in fact what happened to me last Monday morning, on my way to work (where else I could fall, since my name comes from Zazie dans le metro?). It was pretty bad, but here I am, writing about it, so I guess it could be much worse. I didn’t break anything (miraculously enough!) but I ended up on the right side of my head and I must confess it isn’t the best place to have a haematoma that apparently will go away in about 3 (!) weeks.
I know, this episode has nothing to do with cinema, but I was struck once again by the fact that, even in the weirdest and most unpleasant moments of my life, I keep thinking about movies. 
The evidences: 
In France, when a bad accident happens, they call the firemen to bring people to the hospital. I wasn’t an exception. So, after few minutes that I was sitting miserably on the stairs of Abbesses subway station with my face covered in blood, I had a vision: four young and stunningly gorgeous firemen were there to rescue me. Two (very) misplaced thoughts immediately crossed my mind. The first: how can I possibly be so unlucky to meet such wonderful guys while I am at my worst physical conditions? The second: this reminds me of Fahrenheit 451! (how, in a moment like that, I could have thought of a movie by Truffaut is the indisputable proof of my eternal love to him).

When I arrived at the hospital, the scenario was completely different. 

Everybody knows: hospitals are not funny places. I wished to find myself in the Chicago-style atmosphere of Emergency Room, but reality was different. French hospitals in a cold November morning can look a bit gloomy. The atmosphere of Lariboisière actually reminds me of the movie Polisse by Maïwenne. A great film about a police team taking care of abused child. Very often in the movie they take these children to hospitals and this is what I was thinking about while I was waiting to be visited by the doctor:

Once they told me nothing was broken, I felt reassured, but then they decided to have a scan of the right side of my head, just to be sure everything was fine. While I was waiting in the corridor for the scan, I had a weird feeling. Every single person who bumped into me looked terrified. It was for the state of my right eye, of course (at that stage its size was the double of what it should normally be), but I perceived another unpleasant feeling. I realized I looked like a woman who had been beaten by her husband. Explain to other people while you are in an awful corridor of an emergency room that you don’t even have a husband at home that could do that to you! Inevitably enough, I was in no-matter-which of the many Ken Loach movies about miserable and abused people. Thanks very much, Ken!

In the afternoon of that same day, I posted something on Facebook to advise my friends about my accident. Since I couldn’t possibly show a picture of myself, I decided to use one from the movie Elephant Man by David Lynch. Sadly enough, I was thinking about John Hurt in that movie while I was watching myself in the mirror for the first two days after the "event":

In the following days, though, my cinematic reference became Robert De Niro in Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese. I could have been called Zazie La Motta:

Now, unfortunately, the only film character I remind of is Jim Carrey in The Mask (maybe more yellow than green, but still...):

But don't worry, dear readers, I am already dreaming again the same dream I had all my life, that one day soon I will wake up and find myself in the mirror looking like her...

... with just a little scar under my right eyebrow!