Summary
We see Michel riding a dark elevator and lighting a cigarette, before stealing a man's car and picking Patricia up. On the ride to the office, she tells him she's scared of getting old, and he tells her that the worst sin is cowardice as they kiss. She asks him to buy her a Dior, but he refuses. After he drops her off at the office, Michel buys a paper, and sees his picture there with a headline that reads, "Police Killer Still at Large." A man nearby reads the same article and looks over at Michel suspiciously.
Patricia comes out of the office and hops back in the car, as the man reading the paper goes over to two policemen and tells them that Michel is driving away. He drops Patricia off at the press conference and they wave playfully to one another. Patricia goes in to find the novelist being interviewed by a group of admiring journalists, an Italian writer who says he thinks the French will not like his novel because of French "prudishness."
"Can one still believe in love in our time?" one journalist asks, and the novelist says, "Of course, especially in our time." Another journalist references a Rilke quote, "Modern life increasingly separates men and women." The novelist says that Rilke was a great poet and was probably right. Another journalist asks if French and American women are different from one another, and the novelist says they are completely different, because American women dominate their men while French women do not.
Patricia tries to ask the novelist what his greatest ambition is, and he stares at her for a moment, before turning to answer another journalist's question. The journalists ask question after question about gender and love, with one of them asking the difference between eroticism and love. The novelist explains, "Eroticism is a form of love, and vice versa."
Patricia pipes in again, asking, "Do women have a role to play in modern society?" He responds, "If she is charming and wears a striped dress and dark glasses," describing Patricia, who smiles. The journalists ask more and more questions, which the novelist answers quickly. Patricia again asks what his greatest ambition is and he replies, "To become immortal and then die." Patricia removes her glasses and chews on them a moment as the scene shifts to Michel pulling the car he stole into an old lot where he intends to sell it.
Michel knows the man at the lot and the man tells him that he was expecting an Oldsmobile. "It fell through at the last minute," says Michel, as the car salesman tests the engine, telling him he'll give him 800,000 francs next week. When Michel protests, the salesman points out Michel's picture in the paper as the reason why he will not give him the money until later.
It's 3 PM and Michel goes to use the phone, calling Antonio yet again. Antonio still isn't there, but the person on the phone tells Michel to meet Antonio at a certain location at four o'clock. Michel asks the salesman for 10,000 francs, but he refuses. Coming back outside, he realizes the car isn't working anymore and begins beating up the boy who works there for taking out an essential piece.
The scene shifts to Michel in a taxi with Patricia. He points out the hospital where he was born, then an ugly apartment building across the street. "I have a feeling for beauty," he says, before spitting orders at the cab driver. Once they arrive, he tells Patricia to stay in the car, that he'll be back, and goes in to meet Antonio, but finds that Antonio has already left. They then head to Patricia's office and Michel asks why she's going, to which she responds, "To have money and not rely on men."
Michel and Patricia get out of the car and go to the Champs Elysées without paying the fare. They walk through a dark tunnel and Patricia asks Michel to come to the paper's office with her, which he declines. He bids her farewell and they go their separate ways.
At her office, Patricia greets some coworkers and goes to talk to the editor, who asks her how interviewing the novelist went, before introducing her to someone. A man comes into the office and asks after Patricia. He is an inspector and he wants to know more about Michel, holding up a newspaper with Michel's photo. After reading the article, Patricia tells him she doesn't know Michel. "Careful little girl, don't mess with the Paris police," says the inspector, and Patricia admits that she recognizes him. The inspector asks where Michel is and Patricia tells him she doesn't know and that she's only met him five or six times, but knows nothing about him. When he questions her more, she tells him she met him three weeks earlier in Nice. "He came to Paris to find someone who owed him money," she tells the inspector. He gives her his number and tells her to call him if she sees Michel again, then leaves.
Patricia looks upset as he leaves, as the scene shifts to Michel watching two policemen from the street behind a newspaper. Patricia comes outside and motions to Michel that there are policemen looking for him, so he follows her down the street discreetly towards a large crowd watching a parade of motorcycles.
Patricia goes into a movie theater, pursued by a policeman, and runs down a staircase into the dark theater. She then goes into a bathroom, and the policeman goes into the one directly next to it.
Analysis
The suspense heightens in this section when Michel leaves Patricia's apartment and goes out into the world. While he was safe in the cocoon of their lover's nest, in the world he has become all the more recognizable, as a large photo of him has been published in the paper. He finds himself in an easy state of romantic bliss with Patricia, but he is all the more in peril, and his pleasant afternoon with her in a stolen car is interpolated with the suspense of his potential discovery by the police.
The theme of love, particularly the potential connection between a man and a woman in contemporary society, is brought up indirectly at the press conference. One of the journalists asks the novelist if he thinks that romantic love is possible in modernity, and he says absolutely, before agreeing with Rilke, who is quoted as saying, "Modern life increasingly separates men and women." The novelist is positioned as an expert on all matters, a philosopher of sorts, who must demonstrate his perfect understanding of love, culture, human nature, and modernity.
The scene with the novelist takes many of the existential and philosophical questions that have previously been posed in an oblique way, and makes them explicit. The figure of the novelist is imbued with endless authority on a variety of topics, and in this way he is a foil for Michel, who is more impish and less authoritative with his knowledge. We watch as Patricia marvels at the novelist's intellect, a quality that she clearly values. His ability to simply say very wise things is an attractive quality to her, and she smirks at him with an admiration and brightness that we have not seen in her before.
In this section of the film, Patricia must betray Michel to the police, when an inspector visits her at her office. At first, she feigns ignorance, but when the inspector threatens her, she admits she knows Michel. She gives him no more information, then leaves work to help Michel evade the inspectors, who are nearly everywhere now. The stakes of both Michel's freedom and his romance with Patricia are heightened by the fact that he has become more wanted. It brings him and Patricia together in a certain way, while also making their love seem all the more impossible, a romantic if suspenseful dynamic.
A chase ensues as Patricia runs from a policeman, going into a dark movie theater playing an American movie. The scene becomes meta-theatrical, in that we are watching a scene in a movie about an ordinary woman who finds herself in rather cinematic circumstances at a movie theater. The viewer takes a suspenseful ride as we watch the young woman try to evade the policeman in dark glasses and protect the man with whom she is having an affair.
