Repeated Absences

Francois, twenty two years old, works in a bank; he finds the bustle around him empty and has lost his appetite for living. He spends his days shut in his room, barely eating, using drugs. Sophie, his girlfriend, a dancer at the opera, and the parents he lives with watch it helplessly. As the days he misses at work pile up he is dismissed, and then he and Sophie separate. Just as he decides to leave Paris he dies of an overdose; after his death his mother takes her own life. Guy Gilles builds the film not as a warning or a lesson but as the view from inside a life going out. Patrick Penn and Nathalie Delon appear in the seventy nine minute French production, completed in 1972.