Our 'Ronin' tour of France
You’ve got to love it when life imitates art. A favorite “car chase” movie for most guys is John Frankenheimer’s 1998 flick, Ronin. Starring Robert De Niro as a semi-retired Special Forces operative who agrees to do a heist-for-hire with fellow ex-soldier Jean Reno and a shady crew that includes Natasha McElhone, Stellan Skarsgård and Sean Bean, the plot swerves through Paris, down to Arles, and across Nice and Villefranche-sur-Mer in a series of tightly-choreographed car chase scenes that no sensible driving instructor would ever recommend.
As luck would have it, my family and in-laws got to spend a week or so in France recently and sped through some of the very same locations used in the movie. Even more serendipitously, we had rented cars to transport our large group through Nice, Cannes and Monaco. Driving fast cars! Through the South of France! Good thing we had our Philippine International Driver’s Licenses!
Sure, it sounds pretty exciting, doing the Ronin tour in hot European rides, minus the gunplay and grand heist to distract us. But in reality, driving through the South of France is not quite the same as it is in the movies.
In the movie, for instance, a gun battle takes place at night near one of the bridges lining the Seine in Paris. We were on foot in Paris, and our main concern at the Seine was finding the correct boat cruise operator to take us down the river. At night, we spotted many drunks taking refuge along the dark caverns of the Seine banks, but no gun battles. So on that score, Ronin seems a wee bit exaggerated. Maybe we were looking on the wrong side of the Seine. While we didn’t engage in any high-speed car chases, we did manage to get lost several times at night looking for the Metro.
Our tour next took us through Arles, which has an ancient Roman arena that is now used for weekly bullfights. Again, in the film there was a great gun chase — on foot — through the dark, winding tunnels of this arena. We didn’t see any malfeasance there, though. We heard there was to be a “running of the bulls” in Arles that day (Arles has an interesting overlap with Spain. Centuries ago, Spanish pilgrims and gypsies migrated 300 kilometers from their neighboring country to the tiny town of Arles, hearing that a relative of Mary Magdalene had lived there. True or not, they brought lots of Spanish culture and food to Arles, and today they stage bullfights, Spanish paella feasts and bull running during Holy Week.) However, we did not chase anyone in Arles, nor did we get chased by bulls because it was raining that day. Apparently no one in Arles thinks it’s sensible to send bulls skidding and sliding down narrow streets in pursuit of tourists on wet days. So, no luck there.
We ended up renting cars in Nice, the sunny Mediterranean port of which is familiar to those who have seen Ronin. Nice also has some interesting rock ‘n’ roll lore attached to it, since the Rolling Stones holed up in the nearby hills to record their brilliant 1972 double album, “Exile on Main Street.” The Stones had rented a villa called Nellcôte near Villefranche-sur-Mer, ostensibly to make some music, but really just to party and escape Britain’s exorbitant tax laws for as long as possible. (Their frequent car trips up and down the winding roads of Côte d’Azur are memorably detailed in Robert Fraser’s book Up and Down with the Rolling Stones. Needless to say, you didn’t want to be riding shotgun in a roadster with Keith Richards at the wheel in those days. You probably would not want to do so today, either.) There are some stunning views along the roads overlooking Villefranche-sur-Mer (particularly Cap Ferrat, a peninsula that looks like heaven on earth, where King Leopold of Belgium, author Somerset Maugham and others have lived). We’re told this is among some of the world’s most expensive real estate, fetching up to 20 million euros per villa from the rich, famous and infamous.
Nice connects to the principality of Monaco, and of course this is where the F1 circuit takes place every May. (It’s also where Princess Grace Kelly Rainier died in a high-speed car crash on the winding mountainside roads; rumor has it daughter Stephanie was at the wheel at the time.) We were a month early for F1, and seat prices are ridiculous anyway — upwards of 30,000 euros — so we contented ourselves with a ride along the race circuit, something the F1 nuts on our trip (not me; my brother-in-law Gary and sister-in-law Jasmin) relished.
When you set down in Monte Carlo overlooking Fontvieille (a port that’s just lousy with yachts), you notice that there are so many Bentleys, Ferraris, BMVs, Mercedes, Rolls Royces, Porsches and Lamborghinis parked outside the Monte Carlo Casino that the game quickly becomes who can spot the suckiest car among these shining jewels. Hands down, it was the dented Ford Fiesta I saw lumbering around the rotunda like a green turd, as though lost amid the gaudy display of motoring glory.
Back in Nice, we rented our cars one rainy morning (they turned out to be compact Mercedes B series “family” cars, not the sexy Fiats we were promised) and prepared to do the Ronin tour, proper. This turned out to be more difficult than you can imagine, especially since we were relying on GPS to guide us through the streets of Nice. It’s just not very cool or exciting to keep making the same right turns over and over again, navigating narrow, one-way streets at 12 kph, stopping for pedestrians every six feet, and trying not to incur the professional curiosity of the local gendarmes. Even finding our way back to the hotel in our snazzy European cars was a formidable task. When you rely on an electronic guide (rather than asking locals for directions), something as simple as finding a gas station can cause beads of sweat to pop out on your forehead. But somehow it’s just not as exciting as Ronin.
Hitting the highway was a bit more exciting, as we got to tour Grasse (I don’t believe a visit to local perfumeries took place in Ronin, but my wife was keen on going, so…) and then Cannes. Tooling down the seaside locale where the famous film festival takes place at sunset is almost as good as getting into a shoot-out on the banks of the Seine. Almost.
Our Ronin tour ended the next morning with us trying once again to master the GPS system as we searched aimlessly for our car rental agency in Nice. We somehow spotted the garage where we were to drop off the cars, and were about to plow straight down the “Do Not Enter” end of a one-way street when we noticed a cop station right at the corner in front of us… and a Nice cop standing there on the steps, watching our movements with professional curiosity. Beads of sweat formed anew…
If almost getting arrested in Nice for driving down a one-way street is like something out of Ronin, then yeah: we had our Ronin experience in the South of France.
