3 Days to Kill|Petit Palais — the phone call under the gold gate

Christine takes his call here, on Avenue Winston-Churchill, with the Petit Palais behind her: a 1900 exhibition palace that never got taken down, its gilded gate and half-dome facing the Grand Palais across the street like two arguments about the same century. She is a woman who rebuilt a life around her husband's absence, and the film puts her in front of the most ornate doorway in the eighth arrondissement to take a call that will undo the arrangement.

The building rewards the walk-up. Look at the gate — the ironwork is original, restored, and greener and more gold than photographs suggest. Then go inside, because entry to the permanent collection is free and almost nobody outside Paris knows it. Beyond the entrance hall there is a semicircular garden courtyard with a mosaic pool, palms, and a café under the colonnade, and it is quieter at three in the afternoon than most Paris churches.

The avenue itself is the shot. Stand on the median between the two palaces and you can see, in one turn of the head, the Petit Palais gate, the Grand Palais glass roof, and the balustrade of Pont Alexandre III dropping toward the Invalides. The production used all three within a few hundred metres of each other.

Ethan is somewhere else in the city when he dials, doing something he will not describe. Christine stands under all that ornament and answers anyway. That gap is the whole marriage.

Location photos: free-licence stock photography of the Petit Palais (Pexels).