A retired landscape photographer who hasn’t picked up a camera in five years finds her eye rekindled when an impulsive young graffiti artist moves into the apartment next door and turns their shared courtyard into an open-air gallery.
The Story
Marguerite Lavigne was once one of France’s most celebrated nature photographers. Her work hung in the Musee d’Orsay and graced the covers of a dozen monographs. Then her husband passed, the light she had always chased stopped meaning anything, and she packed her Hasselblad into a closet. Five years on, she waters her geraniums, walks to the boulangerie, and watches the world from behind glass.
Theo arrives with spray cans, a portable speaker playing too-loud funk, and absolutely no interest in asking permission. His murals bloom overnight on the courtyard wall — vast, colour-saturated portraits of people from the neighbourhood. Marguerite is furious. Then curious. Then, reluctantly, inspired.
Writer-director Camille Deschamps frames the comedy not in punchlines but in contrasts: analogue versus digital, patience versus impulse, grief versus joy. The two leads orbit each other like mismatched magnets, repelling and attracting in equal measure, until the final sequence — Marguerite’s first photograph in five years, taken at golden hour, of Theo’s largest mural — arrives with the emotional force of a held breath finally released.
You don’t retire from seeing. You just forget you were good at it.
Marguerite, played by Catherine Delsaux
Cast & Crew
- Director: Camille Deschamps
- Starring: Catherine Delsaux, Karim Benali
- Cinematography: Julien Mercier
- Music: Anoushka Shankar
Shot entirely in the Belleville quarter of Paris over a single autumn, the film captures the neighbourhood’s real residents as extras — many of whom appear in Theo’s murals as themselves. Delsaux, a theatre veteran making her screen debut at seventy-two, earned a standing ovation at Cannes and immediate comparisons to the late Jeanne Moreau.