Existential Dilemma
Throughout the film, Patricia endeavors to discover if she is unhappy because she isn’t free, or if she isn’t free because she is unhappy. She is caught in an ambiguous existential state, a confusion about the meaning of her life and her desires for herself. We feel this push and pull between contentment and discontent throughout the film, as she resists Michel one moment and then gives into him the next. Her dilemma is as philosophical as it is emotional, and throughout she poses complex philosophical questions to the more instinctual and earthy Michel.
The man who provides her with clearer answers to life's questions is the novelist who she must interview at the press conference. As reporters shout questions at him, all having to do with broad philosophical questions, he rattles off answers casually, as if picking them out of thin air. While the rest of the characters are unmoored in some way, confused about what their purpose is or where they should go, the novelist has a sureness that seems to comfort Patricia.
The entire film is itself a kind of existential scenario, a metaphor for the difficulties and contradictions of life. The love between Patricia and Michel stands in for all romantic love, as a kind of push-pull between attracted but opposing poles. Their afternoon in Patricia's apartment is the only moment of rest and suspension from the oppressive forward motion of existence, and there they each ponder the meaning of life in their own respective ways. The film does not seek to tie up any of its loose existential ends, but rather to pose them in an open-ended way.
Identity
Most of the film follows an exploration of Michel's identity as a somewhat naive but determined criminal. When we see Michel at a vanity early in the film, he stares at himself in a handheld mirror and then at his face in the larger mirror. This symbolic image signals how Michel becomes who he needs to be in order to get what he wants. In this way, he has multiple identities, which he uses to justify his criminal actions and get by in the world. Over the course of the film, cracks in this identity are revealed, such as when he is called by a different name or when it is revealed that he was once married. He says he was in the army, and also that he worked in the film industry. All of these anecdotes make up a strange tapestry of a man who has lived many lives, however dubious his claims may be. We never learn the truth of Michel's biography, but these fragments account for a complicated and fractured identity.
Patricia, on the other hand, is trying to discover who she is. She’s unhappy and searching for a stable sense of self, a search that leads her towards different men, even as she seeks to carve out an independent career as a writer. While her psychological journey is vastly different from Michel's, she too has many identities. We see her as she navigates all of them. When she is with her editor she is one way, and when she is with Michel she is another. In the final tragic twist, she assumes the identity of informer when she turns Michel in. Identity and its mutability is a central theme in the film.
Games of love
Michel and Patricia are the lovers at the center of the film, drawn relentlessly towards one another, but without a common language with which to understand their attraction. Michel, a playboy who is typically used to discarding former flames without a second thought, is drawn back to Patricia, and his erotic desire seems to him evidence enough of his love for her. Patricia's standards for love are more complex, and while she is undoubtedly attracted to Michel, she cannot quite determine whether she loves him.
In this way, their love becomes a strange dance, a game. At one point, Michel puts his hands around Patricia's neck and playfully threatens to strangle her if she doesn't smile in 8 seconds. His way of showing love and desire for her is by hovering on the precipice of violence with her, an edgy show of affection, and one which works and makes her smile. Where Michel is dangerous, however, Patricia wishes that he would be more romantic. While referring to a poster of the iconic lovers hanging on her wall, Patricia tells Michel that she wants to share a love like that shared between Shakespeare's ill-fated Romeo and Juliet.
The couple continues playing games throughout, which only seem to ignite the erotic spark between them. The game becomes fatal and final, however, when Patricia impulsively calls the cops and turns Michel in. In their argument after she calls, Patricia tells him that she knows she doesn't love him because she was able to inform on him, a logic that Michel resents and cannot understand. The difference between the lovers' philosophies of love creates an ultimately irreconcilable rift between them, one which ends up costing Michel his life.
The Movies
The film is, in many ways, about characters who want to be characters in a film of their own life. Michel wears a fedora and a suit like an old-time-y gangster, and when he encounters a poster of Humphrey Bogart in Paris, he stares at it for a while, emulating Bogey's signature grimace and gestures. This moment of reverence gives us a window into Michel's imagination and his love for cinematic scenarios. In this light, he seems like a man who is more enamored of the affect of his favorite movie stars than of the life of crime into which he has fallen. Criminality seems like a trait that he has adopted more than an intentional undertaking.
Later, Patricia runs from a policeman and ducks into a dark movie theater in the middle of the day. When the policeman follows her in, she escapes through a window in the restroom, finds Michel, and suggests they go kill time at a Western. The two lovers kiss and sit close in the darkness of a movie theater, one of the few moments in the film when we actually see them being physically intimate. The movies, and the imaginative projective space that they open up for the characters, allows them to become intimate, to feel their love for one another, and to suspend the existential worries that plague them otherwise.
Betrayal
The largest twist in the film is the fact that Patricia, who seems to have come around on Michel and begun to open up to him, turns him in to the police. Michel professes his love for her and discusses his plan to run away to Italy with her, but she betrays his trust by ratting him out one morning. Her capriciousness is what ultimately costs Michel his life and this fatal betrayal is what the film leaves the viewer with. Patricia's betrayal is the most consequential moment in the film and determines its tragic end.
Bravery and Cowardice
Fear and bravery come up time and time again in the film. Michel fancies himself a very brave person, willing to stick his neck out to get what he needs to survive. At one point he tells Patricia, "Being afraid is the worst sin there is." He believes that a life well lived is one in which a person does not think twice and faces everything recklessly. Yet, when he is questioned about the fact that he shot a policeman, he insists that he did so because he was scared, and when the police do eventually catch up to him, at first he wants to bravely face them, but then he runs down the street in fear.
Thus Michel is a man who is caught in between his own fear and his desire to be brave and face the consequences of his life. He is driven by a certain sense of forward momentum in everything he does—"Don't use the brakes! Cars are made to go, not to stop!" he says at one point—yet he also runs from his crimes at every turn and cannot quite account for his desires or his actions. This struggle makes him both a heroic figure, in that he is constantly striving for honesty and directness, yet also a tragic one, doomed to death by his own foolhardiness.
Togetherness & Intimacy
A problem that plagues Patricia and Michel in their love for one another is the fact that, while they are both attracted to each other, they struggle to understand one another and to maintain a strong sense of togetherness. They circle around one another without ever achieving any sense of true, deeper connection. At the end, after Patricia has turned Michel into the police, Michel sums up the problem in their relationship by saying, "When we talked, I talked about me, you talked about you, when we should have talked about each other." Their communication style is evidence enough for him that they have never truly been loyal and connected to one another. Each of them, in his view, were trapped in their own subjectivities, unable to reach out and listen to what the other had to say. This, he says, is what led to Patricia's betrayal and the inability of their love to last. Thus, we see that the question of how to connect and breach the surface of a relationship is a major theme in the film.
