- Called Le Grand Rendez-Vous and directed by Claude Lelouch, a newly released short film is a modern take on his C'était un Rendez-Vous from 1976 and stars the Ferrari SF90 Stradale.
- If you like cars speeding through city streets, both are worth watching, but the new one is a bit slicker. Okay, a lot slicker.
- Ferrari promoted the film shoot as a way to make lemonade out of the lemons that COVID-19 brought when it canceled this year's Monaco Grand Prix.
It's a fine line between heritage and retreading old ideas. We'll let you decide which side Ferrari comes down on with its new promotional film, Le Grand Rendez-Vous, which involves history, a fast car, and a beautiful woman. We know, so far, so unoriginal.
Despite a global pandemic that forced the cancellation of this year's Monaco Grand Prix, Ferrari organized a film shoot on location there in late May, the same weekend that would have seen the annual Formula 1 race take to the tight streets. Le Grand Rendez-Vous is the result, and if you know your car movie history, you can get a hint of what it's about when you read that name and see that it was directed by Claude Lelouch. The movie stars—in this order in the credits—His Serene Highness Albert II de Monaco, F1 driver Charles Leclerc, the Ferrari SF90 Stradale, and Rebecca the Florist. Those are more hints, if you need them.
If you're not familiar with Lelouch, then you probably don't know the name C'était un Rendez-Vous ("It Was a Date"), Lelouch's 1976 short film that was nothing but eight minutes of a forward-looking front-bumper-point-of-view shot of a car screaming through the streets of Paris. Well, nothing but that until the very end, when a woman walks up to the driver and you realize he was speeding through town in order to meet up with her. Lelouch was the driver, and the woman was his then partner Gunilla Friden.
Fast forward to Monaco 2020 and Ferrari's promotional push for its new $625,000 plug-in hybrid SF90 Stradale. This time, the technology—in the car and in the cameras—has been improved so we can actually see the car blast through the empty (and closed-off) streets of the principality, retracing the route of the Monaco GP circuit. And there are multiple edits now, so we can see Leclerc take His Highness for a spin before getting his winner's bouquet from Rebecca. Everyone's wearing masks and elbow bumping, putting this fully into the 2020 zeitgeist. The twist, if you can call it that, is that Rebecca hops into the SF90 Stradale at the end, and she and Leclerc take off their masks and smirk. Roll credits. But those credits remind us that we actually shouldn't fast forward too much. The new Ferrari clip specifically says, "All the driving sequences have not been speeded up in post-production."
That's because this is a video focused on speed, and Ferrari can make that part authentic. While there is some mystery about the car used in the 1976 film, there's no question that the 986-hp SF90 Stradale is a better performer. The powertrain used in the SF90 Stradale is the first hybrid propulsion system in a series production Ferrari, and the video shows the new PHEV's first real on-road test, which hit speeds of 149 mph, Ferrari says.
To complete the heritage part, Lelouch went personal. It turns out that Rebecca the Florist is actually Rebecca Blanc-Lelouch, Lelouch and Friden's granddaughter. The short film premiered on the Official Ferrari Magazine website and can now also be seen on YouTube.