Louis Malle directs this adaptation of La Rochelle’s account of the suicide of a friend, himself at a crossroads, having just turned 30 and his biggest hit (“The Lovers”) five years past, almost as if our wandering hero (Maurice Ronet in the performance of his career) is the auteur, looking for an existential out following earlier commercial success. As Ronet visits friends from an earlier life, knowing full well his gun awaits him back home, we get a sense of Paris in the early ‘60’s, still on tilt and nervous from the Algerian War, but chic and stylish just the same, a contrast that psychologically suggests the uneven balance of the character’s dire motivations to connect with the past, and obliterate a potential future.