Leanne Shapton recreates famous car journeys in film history with Niklas Maak. – Culture

The wonderful idea behind “A Woman and a Man” is this: two people go to places from their old favorite films. These places never live up to what the films promised, simply because of the time that has passed them by. They tell completely different stories – and they find their way into this book. Leanne Shapton paints and Niklas Maak narrates.

A man and a woman next to each other in the car is the reflection of a visit to the cinema, it says in the foreword: They sit next to each other and see the same thing, which, Maak believes, creates complicity. The two have already crossed Manhattan on a similar mission, albeit on foot. This time we’re driving, following in the footsteps of film scenes in which there’s also driving.

Leanne Shapton describes in watercolors, Niklas Maak in words, how the routes they chose have changed in reality, while in the film they remain forever as they are: those that Ingrid Bergman and George Sanders did in Roberto Rossellini’s “Viaggio in Italia”; the ride in Diane Keaton’s Beetle with Woody Allen next to her across Manhattan in “The Urban Neurotic”; the journey of Jack Nicholson and his endangered nuclear family to the hotel in “The Shining” where he will lose his mind. If you compare cinema with reality, reality is always the loser because cinema leaves out everything that doesn’t fit into its story. But you can’t choose what you see out the car window.

Despite the pictures, this book is ultimately a word-heavy undertaking because painting, especially when completed in the passenger seat of a car, makes it difficult to take small excursions into design history, as Niklas Maak, the FAZ’s architecture critic, does . Shapton paints what she sees and Maak writes what he thinks – you have to imagine the individual chapters as chains of associations that not only fit into the film scene that lies behind them. In “Viaggio in Italia” Maak is close to the film, in the “Shining” chapter he gets stuck on the idea that the Overlook Hotel is on an indigenous cemetery and moves on from there.

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Seen in this way, “A Woman and a Man” is not a book about films, but rather a book about almost everything on the side of the road, or at least on the side of the road of thought – the failed love stories of friends, Alberto Moravia and the test-tube city of Sabaudia, the painting of a buffalo in the prairie by Albert Bierstadt. This is what films and stories and paintings have in common: they prevent moments from escaping. At their best, Leanne Shapton’s images capture the feeling of a movie scene that cannot be expressed in words – the wet road on which Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée drive to Deauville in Claude Lelouch’s “A Man and a Woman,” for example . It’s somehow there, even though you can’t see any rain in the painting.