The Sign of Leo, completed in 1959 after one false start and a handful of shorts, fitted comfortably into the early new wave formula of Parisian life, with its tale of a student musician, tempted into debt by a promised inheritance, who lapses into abject destitution after the legacy turns out to be a hoax. In retrospect, one can clearly see in it the seeds of Rohmer‘s later work. Showing little interest in plot or action, Rohmer concentrates on demonstrating how Paris itself becomes an objective ­correlative to the hero’s state of mind, gradually metamorphosing from a ­welcoming city into a bleak stone desert as he realises that the friends from whom he might hope to borrow are all away for the vacation. — Tom Milne