Monsieur Hire 1989

Hire Michel Blanc is an isolated bachelor who works as a tailor, with almost no human contact beyond the occasional visits to a brothel, a skating rink, and a bowling alley. He talks to no-one and says he dislikes people, yet he watches those around him closely, and is especially struck by a young woman named Alice Sandrine Bonnaire who moves into the building opposite and never closes her blinds. He spends his evenings secretly watching her, with more than curiosity or lust because he has fallen in love.

One evening the dead body of a young woman is found nearby, and, watching his neighbor, Hire sees her boyfriend Émile Luc Thuillier washing blood off his raincoat and hiding a handbag. Hire says nothing to the police, because he wants to protect Alice, but then the police start investigating him, with the inspector André Wilms trying to trick and intimidate him into confessing to murder.

While watching Alice one night from his darkened apartment, a flash of lightning reveals his staring face. Alice is at first horrified at being spied on and then is intrigued at who he can be. She engineers a meeting on the landing outside his flat, but he is too embarrassed to acknowledge her. Next evening she looks openly back at him and indicates that she is coming over. When she comes over, he rejects her advances. In the end, he agrees to meet her at the railway station restaurant, where he declares his love for her. He says he owns a small house in Switzerland to which the two of them could flee, which would separate her from the murderer Émile, with whose crime she is complicit, and get the police off Hire’s back.

He buys two train tickets, giving one to Alice, and writes a letter to the police inspector denouncing Émile. At the station, Alice does not turn up, so he returns to his apartment. The inspector is there with Alice, who has placed the murdered woman’s handbag among Hire’s things for the inspector to find. Hire makes a break for it, but falls from the roof and is killed. Only later does the inspector read the letter and find Émile’s bloodstained raincoat.