Melville's work, to the chagrin of many critics and on his own recurrent insistence, is hermetically sealed, has no direct purchase on the "real" world, is ultimately (in its conscious dimensions at any rate) about cinema rather than "reality".’
Colin McArthur , ‘Mise-en-scène degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï, in Susan Hayward & Ginette Vincendeau (eds), French Film: Texts and Contexts (London: Routledge, 2000), p.198.
For a fuller discussion of maps and places in Le Samourai, see here.