3 Days to Kill|Jardin d'Acclimatation — the carousel and the childhood he missed

On the northern edge of the Bois de Boulogne there is a garden that opened in 1860 as an imperial zoo and became, over a century and a half, the place Parisian families take small children. The Jardin d'Acclimatation has a narrow-gauge train, a mirror maze, a river of paddle boats, and carousels — the reason the production came. The film puts Ethan here among the roundabouts and the shrieking, and the joke is quiet and mean: this is the last age at which he could have been a father to Zooey, and she is seventeen.

The garden's history is stranger than its current cheerfulness suggests. It was Napoleon III's experiment in acclimatising exotic animals to French weather, then a siege larder in 1870 when Paris ate the zoo, then a fairground, then a nineteenth-century human zoo whose exhibitions the garden and its neighbours have since had to reckon with publicly. Ride the little train past the flowerbeds and none of that is visible, which is its own kind of information.

Practical notes: it is a ticketed park, open daily, easiest from Porte Maillot on line 1 or the small train that runs from there on weekends and school holidays. Attractions cost extra. Go on a weekday morning if you want the carousels turning half-empty.

Watch the parents rather than the rides. That is what Ethan is doing in the scene, and it is the closest the film comes to saying out loud what he has spent twenty years buying with his salary.

Location photo: free-licence stock photography of the Bois de Boulogne, the park that surrounds the garden (Pexels).