Rendezvous: Fasten your seat belts...

It's 27 years since Claude Lelouch made the baffling, high-speed film 'Rendezvous'. Now a new generation is set to be teased again. Matthew Sweet reports

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 Pepé 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-Elysées 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?

Lelouch won't say. Even now, over 25 years later, he maintains an unbreakable silence on the subject. The only statement he has ever made is contained in a caption that prefaces the film, exhorting the audience to believe its eyes and ears. Rendezvous was shot, he asserts, without recourse to camera tricks. The speed of the film has not been altered to increase the speed of the journey. And as you watch the edit-free point-of-view footage, follow the vehicle's screaming passage through red lights, track its swerves into lanes of oncoming traffic, shudder at its near-squeak avoidance of collisions with buses and dustcarts and Parisiennes and their dogs, it's not difficult to understand his reticence. To romantic observers, these images are a record of a less regulated age, when public stunts like this were possible. But even they would admit that the film also seems to be evidence of an insane criminal act.

In the absence of hard facts, the cinephiles, boy-racers and potheads who have made a cult of the film – and who have been trading second-generation copies on the internet for $50 a pop – are free to debate the authenticity of the work, and add to the thick layer of mythology that surrounds it. One ardent admirer, Richard Simons, a British documentary-maker who fits into the first category, was introduced to the film by a friend who is a member of the last. "You enjoy the sensation, the primitive pleasure of the speed," he explains. "But you also appreciate that what you're watching appears to be very, very irresponsible."

Simons was so exhilarated by Rendezvous that he acquired the rights to distribute the film in the UK, and funded the restoration of the best print. Lelouch's company, he says, was surprised by his interest, and the deal took several months to close. "Before we knew it would be possible to get hold of it," he confesses, "we thought about trying to recreate it. But then I had a go at accelerating towards a red light and immediately realised the depth of the film's insanity. I've heard of racing drivers who will pull out blind to overtake when they're driving on a dual carriageway, just to test their reactions. But that's not like accelerating towards a red light."

Rendezvous is a variation on one of cinema's most archaic forms – the phantom ride, in which a camera was mounted on a moving vehicle (most frequently a train) and the spectators were hurtled along on a driver's-eye-view of the journey. Victorian audiences devoured these one-reel spectacles, and though the genre was short-lived, the technique mutated and survived: the penultimate quarter-hour of 2001: A Space Odyssey is probably the most celebrated example from 20th-century cinema. Kubrick, however, employed a visual effect called slit-scan to power his accelerated trip to Jupiter. Lelouch's eye-popping drive through Paris appears to send its spectators on a journey of comparable velocity, without the use of such tricks.

It's hard to pull a fast one on a car fanatic. For the polar car-chase scenes in the James Bond flick, Die Another Day, the special-effects crew replaced the powerful V12 engine of an Aston Martin Vanquish with a V8, but ensured that the soundtrack still bore the roar of the correct machinery. There are audience members out there who would find such a discontinuity less plausible than the idea that the car is fitted with a button that renders it invisible.

People with too much time on their hands have been attempting to sniff out evidence of similar subterfuge in Rendezvous. On a website devoted to the film, a German viewer concludes that, contrary to the whine of the soundtrack, the car isn't travelling at racetrack speed. "I figured out the time needed to drive down the Champs-Elysées from the Arc de Triomphe to Place de la Concorde: about 70 seconds in a straight line. By measuring the distance on a map (about 2,000m), you'll get the average speed: about 64mph. Certainly not a Ferrari at full speed, but probably an ordinary car driven somewhat faster than allowed."

Does the pitch of the gear-change deceive the eye? Or did Lelouch violate every traffic by-law in the book? Perhaps his silence has less to do with a fear of drawing attention to a 27-year-old driving offence than the exposure of Rendezvous as a triumph of cinema trickery over cinema-vérité. See the film, however, and the colour of your knuckles may convince you that such arguments are irrelevant.

'Rendezvous' will be screened at the Electric Cinema, Portobello Road, London W11, with 'Confessions of a Dangerous Mind', 14-28 March. It is also available from www.spiritlevelfilm.com