Not every Louis Malle film is great.

Le feu follet isn’t. But it is worth seeing for one reason: to see the picture of Paris in 1963. Many wax sentimental at its memory; a recent IHT piece bewailed that old Paris of café intellectual life now irretrievably gone. Look, you can see it here. Two things are striking: the terrible clothes (I don’t mean the cuts, which, being fashion, may have been different by 1964; I mean the poor quality of the textiles, clearly visible even in a black and white film); and the horrible noise of the traffic. People sitting in outdoor cafés have to shout to hear each other. The film does not show it, but the horrible air quality is easy to guess at. Yet people sit in those outdoor cafés, just as they do now at Thapae Gate in Chiang Mai, two feet from roaring traffic and breathe in the horrible hot air full of oily particulate matter; they sit, sip, smoke, and chat. In twenty or thirty years they will reminisce about how great it was. Incredible.