The 355|Passage du Grand-Cerf — Twelve Metres of Sky Over a Shortcut

Paris kept about a dozen of its covered passages, and this is the tall one. The Passage du Grand-Cerf runs from the Rue Saint-Denis through to the Rue Dussoubs in the 2nd arrondissement, and its glass roof sits nearly twelve metres up — high enough that the arcade reads as a street with a lid rather than a corridor. The 355 used it during the Paris sequence, and the reason is obvious the second you step inside: the height gives a camera somewhere to go.

It was built in 1825 on the site of the Grand-Cerf coaching inn, the yard where mail coaches left for the north. The ironwork is original. The shopfronts are wood, and the tenants run to jewellers, African textile dealers, a design bookshop, and a couple of workshops where somebody is visibly working rather than waiting for tourists. Gates close it at night, which is why it has survived in better condition than most of its neighbours.

Enter at 145 Rue Saint-Denis. Stop under the centre of the roof and look straight up: the glazing bars make a grid that throws a moving pattern down onto the tiles as clouds pass over, and on a bright, breezy afternoon the whole passage brightens and dims like a slow shutter. Nobody in here is in a hurry except the people in the film.

Location photo via Wikimedia Commons.