3 Days to Kill|Rue de l'Abreuvoir & Place Dalida — the street where his family lived without him

Christine and Zooey live at the top of Montmartre, on a bend of cobbles so photogenic it has been painted more often than most people have been photographed. Rue de l'Abreuvoir runs downhill from Place Dalida in a slow curve, past the pink façade of La Maison Rose, past low houses with green shutters and vines that go copper in October. In the film it is the address Ethan keeps approaching and keeps failing to earn his way into — he watches the windows, he waits at the corner, he is a professional at entering buildings and cannot enter this one.

The street was a watering path once; that is what abreuvoir means, the place animals drank. Now it is one of the last stretches of Montmartre that still reads as a village rather than a set. Place Dalida sits at the top with its bronze bust of the singer, worn bright at the shoulders by decades of hands. From the bust, look down the rue and you get the exact framing the production used: cobbles falling away, the pink corner, and beyond it the dome of Sacré-Cœur cutting into the sky.

Go before nine in the morning. After ten the bend fills with queues for the same photograph and the illusion collapses. Residents actually live behind those shutters, so keep your voice down and stay off the doorsteps.

The scene works because of a small cruelty in the geography: Ethan can see his family's window from the street, and the street is public, and that is as close as the job has left him.

Location photos: free-licence stock photography of Rue de l'Abreuvoir and La Maison Rose (Pexels).