"This is the single most underrated film of the entire French New Wave. Its near obsessive tracking of Maurice Ronet through the wet Paris streets as he retraces the steps of a wasted life makes for one of the most tightly focused of the era’s film portraits of a desperate man at the end of his rope. Its slow build toward an inexorable end is Louis Malle’s most nuanced work—this from a director who was already noted for his almost classical discipline. Ronet, until then largely thought of as a lightweight romantic film actor, surrenders himself to the downhill yet strangely transcendent fate that awaits him on the mirror of his room."

"“Louise is the girl with the perfect skin/ She says turn on the light, otherwise it can't be seen/ She's got cheekbones like geometry and eyes like sin/ And she's sexually enlightened by Cosmopolitan”. To think that was a hit record! It can be done. It can be done. I can remember everything. Again, it’s one of my favourite covers ever - the mystery of this story of a hazy door - are you going to open it and enter this world of student bedsit literary excellence? It’s a really underrated album and I absolutely adore it to this day. I’ve been trying to get my kids into it, but they’re not having it. It’s all Daft Punk for them."