A bout de souffle,  sequence 3: narrative of an identification

The topography of A bout de souffle is very simple: an opening sequence in Marseille, clearly marked by signs and landmarks; a sequence heading to Paris on a road later identified (in newspaper headlines) as the Route Nationale 7;  a succession of Paris locales, with one excursion out to Orly airport and a garage at Thiais (possibly). Furthermore, the succession of locales in Paris is with a few exceptions topographically coherent. This account has to do with one of those exceptions.

Marie-Christine Vincent & François de Saint-Exupéry, Paris vu au cinéma (éd. 2003/2004), p.93

Seven minutes into  the  film Michel Poiccard is drinking a beer in the Royal Saint Germain, a café at 149 boulevard Saint Germain (now an Emporio Armani). He crosses the boulevard towards the café de Flore and the rue Saint Benoît; after the cut we see him entering the courtyard of an apartment building in which an ex-girlfriend occupies a 'chambre de bonne', a small room on the top floor. He's had time to buy a newspaper, but otherwise nothing suggests that the action of this second shot occurs much later (no fades, dissolves or irises).  

We could conclude, then, that the building is somewhere just north of the boulevard Saint Germain, especially as Michel invites Liliane, the friend he is visiting, to come have breakfast with him in the café he's just left.

The obvious place to look was the rue Saint Benoît, which is where I began. All I had to go on was the distinctive design of the building's gates, but that was enough to rule out every arched doorway not only on the rue Saint Benoît but also on every one of twenty streets in that vicinity (some of them very long).  I then cast the net wider but with no luck, and  concluded that this would have to be one of those locations in A bout de souffle that couldn't be localised.

Another hard-to-identify location in A bout de souffle is the premises of the car dealer to whom Michel brings a stolen Thunderbird. There is a sign visible, reading 'GRAVIER DEVES', which might lead to something, given the right phone directory, but this place is clearly somewhere just outside of Paris and my only directory from the period doesn't cover the banlieues.

Help here came from within the film: when Michel phones to make his appointment with the car dealer, he asks for the number 'Belle Epine 35 26', an area code that situates the dealer in Thiais, just south of  Paris. Thiais is on the way to Orly, where Michel takes Patricia before seeing the dealer, so if we assume topographical coherence this seems a feasible identification.  Thiais has changed too much for an actual 'then and  now' match to be possible, but confirmation may come when I find the right phone directory. 

A novelisation of A bout de souffle, by Claude Francolin, came out just after the film and seems to have been written with some inside knowledge of the actual making of the film (it accurately locates a multi-story garage from which Michel and Patricia steal a Cadillac). Francolin identifies the location of the dealer's premises as in Thiais.

As for the location of the building with which I began, Francolin is of no help.  He locates it vaguely near the boulevard Saint Germain, but give no address.

Alain Bergala, for his book Godard au travail, had access to a vast amount of material related to the production, including the detailed call sheets, and though he doesn't identify this specific location in the book, I could of course go to the same archive and have all my questions  answered.

Or perhaps not. In Chambre 12, Hôtel de Suède, a documentary on the making of  A bout de souffle, Claude Ventura shows the callsheet to Pierre Rissient, the assistant who had drawn it up, and shows to the camera precisely the part of it referring to the sequence with Liliane. It just says 'St Germain' and 'chambre de bonne'.

Ventura talks to Liliane David, the actress in the chambre de bonne, and she makes it clear that they were filming the scene in her own room. (She'd just got up, but they wouldn't let her brush her hair or put on makeup.) 
I don't have the phone directory that would tell me where she was living at the time, but the information is actually nearer to hand, in recent biography a of François Truffaut. Baecque & Toubiana refer to Truffaut dropping Liliane off 'chez elle, rue du Colonel Moll' (which is in the 17th).  
Lilane David was Truffaut's girlfriend at the time. It was through him, he tells Ventura, that she got the part in A bout de souffle.  (In her room she has a copy of Cahiers du cinéma with Les 400 coups on the cover.)

Here she is, on the fringes of two other films from the same moment, Jean-Pierre Mocky's Les Dragueurs (1959) - in a scene written by Godard - and Claude Chabrol's Les Bonnes Femmes (1960):

To know if the scene with Liliane David  in A bout de souffle was actually filmed in the rue du Colonel Moll, all I had to do was examine every doorway on that street. The first sight (on Google Maps this time, not on foot) was very promising: every other doorway seemed to be arched, with elaborate wrought iron gates. Closer examination showed great stylistic variety in the ironwork, but finally a match appeared:

From Google Maps I couldn't see the inside of the courtyard of 21 rue du Colonel Moll, so I contacted  a photographer living in the building and asked him to  compare these images with what he could see around him. His answer was that they seem to be the same place.

For further confirmation there is this production still of Raoul Coutard at work on A bout de souffle, standing on the uppermost part of number 19 rue du Colonel Moll:

(No shot from this position made it into the finished film.)

From the Royal Saint Germain to the rue du Colonel Moll is about 3.5 kilometres, but Michel Poiccard's leap across the city in the space of a cut is not quite creative geography, is not the reconfiguration of a Paris that belongs to the filmmakers, to do with as they will. It's just a matter of convenience. Why dress a set to look like the typical room of a typical girl on the fringes of the cinema industry, when they can film in  Liliane's room, with all the  authentic accoutrements of just such a person. (How different the room might have been had Anna Karina accepted Godard's offer to play this role.) 

If the cost of having a ready-made authentic interior is a minor exterior incongruity, then so be it. The topographical inconsistency in the jump from the 6th to the 17th arrondissement is, after all, barely perceptible, having passed unnoticed for more than fifty years. 

(My thanks to Philippe Forestier for help with the identifications in this piece.)