Want to bump into movie stars? Forget Hollywood — the French Alps is the place to find them
Read all about the Slope of Fame...
Ed Grenby - 7 December 2023
Not a natural on skis, I swoosh precariously past Gemma Arterton, spray snow all over Noomi Rapace, then crash head-on into Isabelle Huppert. This isn’t, lawyers please note, my Gwyneth Paltrow moment: unlike the retired optometrist from Utah who collided with the actor in 2016, I had the good sense to hit only my stars’ avatars. You see, the ski resort of Les Arcs, high in the French Alps, is a kind of movieland-on-the-mountains, and its Slope of Fame is a permanent homage to some of the film and TV folk who’ve visited. The Slope of Fame is dotted with person-sized signed plaques, but that’s far from the main attraction for movie fans. Every December, Les Arcs hosts a week-long film festival that brings together the best of European cinema, with screenings, discussions, workshops, parties and industry events.
Highlights at this year’s shindig include some best foreign film Oscar nominees and Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the man behind Olivia Colman’s The Favourite. On a continent that never really embraced To receive emails with our latest news and offers, visit radiotimes.com/email the concept of drive-in movies, it’s great that there is somewhere you can experience “ski-in” cinema: some of the venues for the festival are so close to the pistes that you can literally carve right up to the red carpet, plant your skis or board in the snow and march right into the auditorium. (Or at least you could if you were a more competent skier than me.) Even more fun, I found, was the “ski-out”: emerging from a darkened room into the blinkingly bright sparkle of sun on snow for a few more runs. Les Arcs is a lovely-looking resort even when the sun is as reluctant to appear in public as an A-lister. For cloudy days, when visibility issues can make the mountaintops slightly hard to ski, there are the prettily wooded slopes of Peisey Vallandry. You’ll find long, cruise-y blue and red runs here and all over Les Arcs, which makes it a great bet for beginners, intermediates and families.
More ambitious skiers, meanwhile, can upgrade their lift passes to include the whole Paradiski area, including neighbouring La Plagne, which doubles the domaine to more than 400km of slopes. And on really cloudy days, there’s always the food. Here, just a few kilometres from the Italian border, cheesy French mountain cuisine meets pasta and the result is worth the massive calorie intake. One restaurant in particular that’s worth paying a visit is La Table des Lys in the village of Arc 1950. In fact, even the food can be a cinematic experience in Les Arcs. One day I have lunch 2,700 metres high in a Bond-villain-lair of a place, all glass walls, cold steel and sharp modern angles at the razor-edge top of a mountain – though, disappointingly, the café is called B.O.B rather than S.P.E.C.T.R.E (maisonfalcoz.com/bob). The views are a widescreen epic, and I find my head panning slowly from one side to another, like a panorama tracking shot (is that Mont Blanc in the distance?). Skiing back down after, it’s almost impossible not to imagine black-clad baddies on my tail. Dammit, where’s Roger Moore’s Union Jack parachute when I need it, having fallen embarrassingly in front of a group of schoolchildren and tumbled down half a red run?
I am staying at Bear Lodge (vipchalets.com/hotels/bear-lodge), a gorgeous new wood-and-stone creation that features both hotelstyle rooms and chalets catered by enthusiastic young Brits. It’s situated perfectly: guests can ski straight in and out on a lovely wide blue run, the perfect start to the day for stiff or rusty ski legs, and there are also multiple lifts within a few steps. There’s complimentary guiding, a spa and a children’s play area, but the best surprise was wandering back from the sauna and finding a cinema room with rows of sink-into sofas and a serious-sized screen. Trying to look indifferent, I checked the programme to see if it was more of the brainy auteur-driven European cinema featuring at the film festival – but was secretly pretty gleeful when I saw what was actually showing: Pulp Fiction, The Greatest Showman, Slumdog Millionaire, Shrek and, of course, Chalet Girl. The perfect addition to a film festival in the snow.
ED GRENBY
A room for two in Bear Lodge starts from £830pp for seven nights including Geneva Airport transfers and catering — available exclusively through VIP SKI (vip-chalets.com). Pre-book lift-passes with VIP SKI, from £297 for six days. Multiple airlines fly to Geneva. For more information, see en.lesarcs.com and arc1950.com
Not a natural on skis, I swoosh precariously past Gemma Arterton, spray snow all over Noomi Rapace, then crash head-on into Isabelle Huppert. This isn’t, lawyers please note, my Gwyneth Paltrow moment: unlike the retired optometrist from Utah who collided with the actor in 2016, I had the good sense to hit only my stars’ avatars. You see, the ski resort of Les Arcs, high in the French Alps, is a kind of movieland-on-the-mountains, and its Slope of Fame is a permanent homage to some of the film and TV folk who’ve visited. The Slope of Fame is dotted with person-sized signed plaques, but that’s far from the main attraction for movie fans. Every December, Les Arcs hosts a week-long film festival that brings together the best of European cinema, with screenings, discussions, workshops, parties and industry events.
Highlights at this year’s shindig include some best foreign film Oscar nominees and Poor Things, starring Emma Stone, Mark Ruffalo and Willem Dafoe and directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, the man behind Olivia Colman’s The Favourite. On a continent that never really embraced To receive emails with our latest news and offers, visit radiotimes.com/email the concept of drive-in movies, it’s great that there is somewhere you can experience “ski-in” cinema: some of the venues for the festival are so close to the pistes that you can literally carve right up to the red carpet, plant your skis or board in the snow and march right into the auditorium. (Or at least you could if you were a more competent skier than me.) Even more fun, I found, was the “ski-out”: emerging from a darkened room into the blinkingly bright sparkle of sun on snow for a few more runs. Les Arcs is a lovely-looking resort even when the sun is as reluctant to appear in public as an A-lister. For cloudy days, when visibility issues can make the mountaintops slightly hard to ski, there are the prettily wooded slopes of Peisey Vallandry. You’ll find long, cruise-y blue and red runs here and all over Les Arcs, which makes it a great bet for beginners, intermediates and families.
More ambitious skiers, meanwhile, can upgrade their lift passes to include the whole Paradiski area, including neighbouring La Plagne, which doubles the domaine to more than 400km of slopes. And on really cloudy days, there’s always the food. Here, just a few kilometres from the Italian border, cheesy French mountain cuisine meets pasta and the result is worth the massive calorie intake. One restaurant in particular that’s worth paying a visit is La Table des Lys in the village of Arc 1950. In fact, even the food can be a cinematic experience in Les Arcs. One day I have lunch 2,700 metres high in a Bond-villain-lair of a place, all glass walls, cold steel and sharp modern angles at the razor-edge top of a mountain – though, disappointingly, the café is called B.O.B rather than S.P.E.C.T.R.E (maisonfalcoz.com/bob). The views are a widescreen epic, and I find my head panning slowly from one side to another, like a panorama tracking shot (is that Mont Blanc in the distance?). Skiing back down after, it’s almost impossible not to imagine black-clad baddies on my tail. Dammit, where’s Roger Moore’s Union Jack parachute when I need it, having fallen embarrassingly in front of a group of schoolchildren and tumbled down half a red run?
I am staying at Bear Lodge (vipchalets.com/hotels/bear-lodge), a gorgeous new wood-and-stone creation that features both hotelstyle rooms and chalets catered by enthusiastic young Brits. It’s situated perfectly: guests can ski straight in and out on a lovely wide blue run, the perfect start to the day for stiff or rusty ski legs, and there are also multiple lifts within a few steps. There’s complimentary guiding, a spa and a children’s play area, but the best surprise was wandering back from the sauna and finding a cinema room with rows of sink-into sofas and a serious-sized screen. Trying to look indifferent, I checked the programme to see if it was more of the brainy auteur-driven European cinema featuring at the film festival – but was secretly pretty gleeful when I saw what was actually showing: Pulp Fiction, The Greatest Showman, Slumdog Millionaire, Shrek and, of course, Chalet Girl. The perfect addition to a film festival in the snow.
ED GRENBY
A room for two in Bear Lodge starts from £830pp for seven nights including Geneva Airport transfers and catering — available exclusively through VIP SKI (vip-chalets.com). Pre-book lift-passes with VIP SKI, from £297 for six days. Multiple airlines fly to Geneva. For more information, see en.lesarcs.com and arc1950.com