Oh, merde! To be cut down in the prime of life by a Paris policeman's machine-gun bullet!... As Marcel swoons on the concrete in a puddle of his own blood, a series of flashcut pictures streams through his semi-consciousness... As in some unrealized film collaboration by Resnais and Robbe-Grillet (this time directed by the latter and edited by the former), the fleeting images corkscrew back and forth through time, from childhood to his adulthood as a peripatetic hoodlum, and even to imagined images from the life of his parents' and grandparents' day, and also to an anticipated future he will now, sad to say, experience only via these unspooling fantasies... He sees horrific events known only to dusty Parisian police ledgers, brief moments from his demimonde meanderings, and above all: the many women with whom he's shared moments charged with cruelty and tenderness... All the girls for whom he procured, or pushed into the cubbyholes of pornography... The few who slipped away from being turned out... His prostitute mother who'd never reveal his father's name, and, in her dressing room after a long night of "dancing," when Marcel's little hand would drift up the strap running up her half-naked thigh, would brush it away, exhorting "Away with you, little black garter snake!"......

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