There is poetry in this film about four shopgirls in Paris, one of whom, Jacqueline (Bernadette Lafont), feels sure she has discovered the love of her life in a fatally mysterious motorcyclist. David Thomson writes: “This is Paris in the early 1960s, real premises, gray streets outside, the boredom of waiting for the day to end, and the courage to endure the marginally less listless pleasures of the evening.… No one in the film is aware enough to appreciate Chabrol's unique balancing of the haphazard and the fatal; no one can quite tell accident from disaster, or Prince Charming from Jack the Ripper.... Once upon a time, the cinema would have made (the young women) pals forever, allies in looking for love. But here they are going off in different directions of eccentricity, held in place only by the arid persistence of the shop and the implacable coolness of the camera. We are left trying to judge which is more cruel or more random-life or the film.”