The whole picture struck me as a lot more deliberate than most American critics seemed to find it. Especially when Manesquier goes on about how bored he gets playing the piano, even Beethoven, especially Schumann, Chopin least. It's a middle-brow stroke of genius: to impress people with Manesquier's familiarity with the romantic composers and yet to avoid putting them off by suggesting that if they aren't familiar with the composers they haven't missed much. All that's required is that they recognize the names.

And then there's the scene with Edith Scob (the daughter in the mask in Georges Franju's horror classic Les Yeux sans visage (1960; Eyes Without a Face) as Manesquier's proper, repressed sister. She's come to pack his bag for the hospital and Manesquier attempts to break through the reserve that has overtaken them since their normal, happy childhood. He succeeds, in the nick of time, by getting her to admit that her husband, whom we never see, is a "fat prick." She does at least refrain from agreeing that her sons are "cretins," but altogether the scene, objectionable in itself, is like a three-minute version of a bad domestic drama, and yet we're actually supposed to cheer it as an emotional breakthrough.

The use of poetry in the movie is far more adept. The snippet that Milan responds to (following the spelling of the original):

Dans Arle, où sont les Aliscams, Quand l'ombre est rouge, sous les roses, Et clair le temps, Prends garde à la douceur des choses.

is by Paul-Jean Toulet, from his 1920 collection Les Contrerimes. (Milan likes that last line: beware of the sweetness of things.) We also hear bits from Louis Aragon's "Sur le Pont Neuf," the poem that opens his 1956 Roman inachevé, in which passing others on the bridge sets off self-contemplation in the poet. This stanza

Sur le Pont Neuf j'ai rencontré Mon autre au loin ma mascarade Et dans le jour décoloré Il m'a dit tout bas Camarade

could be the kernel of the movie, and Rochefort and Hallyday do all anyone could to bring out the complementary contrast between the two men. Hallyday, the flamboyant yé-yé singer of the '60s, now in his 60s, gets his effects much more simply than Rochefort. He looks out from his rugged, worn face, through repitilian, glaucously blue eyes, and keeps his responses to a minimum. (Hallyday here appears dried out, less work for his mummifier than the average corpse.) Milan knows there's no point to most interactions and so avoids the trouble of entanglements. His shirttails come untucked when he speaks too frankly to Manesquier's mistress, but mostly he just wants to get through his days, and if that means going along with an ill-conceived robbery, that's what he'll do.

Milan's refusal to engage comes from the self-protectiveness of the criminal, but also from his awareness that age has made him peripheral to the world. This plays out when Manesquier takes Milan to a restaurant where two younger men, horsing around by a pinball machine, bump into them as if they were furniture. They don't apologize because Milan and Manesquier are old, what can they do? Manesquier decides to change his life by confronting them, and the ironic turnaround is the only moment in the movie that tasted more like juice than drink.