[...] In Malle's black-and-white world, animated by the haunting strains of Erik Satie's score, Ronet's Alain Leroy is a lost cause, a narcissist with no hope of growing up. Malle claims,

It wasn't really the suicide that interested me, but how a man reflects on his youth and realizes, in the end, that the beautiful and important part of his life was his youth. From the end of youth until death, we're in constant decline. . . . It's not putting a bullet through our heart or head that matters, but that we have the clarity to realize that something's gone that will never return.