The fifteen pages of La Glace à trois faces by Paul Morand thus blend together in a scénario of devoted simplicity and truthfulness to cinema. After falsely endless dramas, here is a drama that would like to be free of exposure and grounds for development, and which ends abruptly. The events do not follow one another, yet they correspond exactly. The fragments of the multiple pasts come together in a single today. The happening explodes among memories. It is the chronology of the human soul. Each character presents itself in its loneliness, and the story keeps them definitively separated. Nevertheless they live together, one for the other.

[…] The first French narratives, at school, are written in the present. Cinema tells everything in the present, down to its intertitles. Later, once more grammar and rhetoric have been learned, students use the past and the future in their writings, mixed up, in agreement. The present is an unfortunate convention. In the midst of time, there is an exception to time. It escapes the chronometer. Look at your watch: the present in a strict sense is already gone; and speaking literally, it’s there again, it will always be there, one minute after the next. I think therefore I was. The I of the future becomes I in the past; the present is nothing more than this mute incessant instant. The present is no more than a meeting. Cinema is the sole art that can represent what this present is.

Jean Epstein,in  Comoedia, 18 novembre 1927