 The principal map is of course the map of Paris onto which is drawn a version of the jeu de l'oie. This map has its reverse image in the map of the greater Paris region printed on the reverse, onto which the jeu de l'oie is also, necessarily, imposed:  The principal map has as complement a non-map emulating the layout of the jeu del'oie:   Of the other maps in the film, only one seems to signify - the same large map of the Paris métro, positioned incongruously in two different places:   Four other maps are glimpsed in passing:     For details on the places in this film, see here. 
A button pressed draws the curtain back from the map of Europe:
The pins on the map represent OSS operatives. When he learns that two agents have died, he removes their pins from the map and drops them into a waiting receptacle: 
     Maps feature heavily, but the central spatial machinery connecting places in the film is the sending of postcards:       Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961)  Jacquot de Nantes (1991)       After pointing to relevant locales on the map of France, Moullet's New Wave documentary (reflexive, intertextual, montage-driven, jumpcutting) about abandoned or near-abandoned villages uses regional maps to fix exactly the places filmed, and to illustrate movement from one place to another:            Two maps in the mise-en-scène, in schoolrooms, serve as counterpoint to the maps in the montage:             Movement from the film's first location (the penal colony in French Guyana) to its second location (Belleville, Paris) is effected by this simple cinemap, presented in silence (where otherwise Grémillon's film is strikingly experimental in its use of sound). 
Frenchman Duvivier's 1944 war-effort film was made in Hollywood, and opens with a map expressive of the exile's gloom: France is cast in darkness. The map is closed in on, showing at first only Tours, strangely, then more obviously Paris, before following the line back from Paris to Tours, where the film's first action is set (explaining that town's prominence on the map). From there the protagonist's trajectory is followed South, whence he will eventually embark for Africa. As the principal setting of the ensuing action, West Africa is on all the maps we then see. Most are in the mise-en-scène, though one is a cinemap tracing the protagonist's movements. (In its movement northwards it reverses the trajectory of the film's opening cinemap.) 
 The story of Lola is little more than that of the preparations made by its male protagonist, Roland, to leave Nantes. This story is framed by the return to Nantes of Michel, father of Lola’s child. He has been seven years on a South Pacific island, Matareva, as if he has arrived in Demy’s film from Mark Robson’s 1953 Return to Paradise (which Roland goes to see at a cinema in Nantes in the course of the film). Michel’s arrival is the counterweight to the departure not only of Roland but also of the little Cécile (who has run off to Cherbourg), of Frankie and the other sailors, heading back via Cherbourg to the U.S., and of Lola and her son, who are leaving for Marseille. Of all these only Roland is associated with maps. He passes a map of France as he leaves his place of work, after having been fired. In his room he studies closely a map of the ‘Five Parts of the World’, and the man who offers him louche employment as a courrier (flying from Amsterdam to South Africa) explains the itinerary by pointing to a map.        |
