Eight years after their separation, Abel meets Marianne again, at Paul’s funeral. Abel sees this tragic event as a good omen. Paul’s death will allow him to win Marianne back. That is, unless Joseph, Paul and Marianne’s son, and Paul’s sister Eve, acting behind the scenes, don’t succeed in destroying Abel’s hopes…

My first film was about the expression of feelings: it was feverish, and the characters spent their time trying to express how they felt. In this film, I’m trying to do the exact opposite: we don’t know their state of mind, they never talk about their emotions. In that sense, it is not a sentimental film.

These two people meet again eight years after their separation, but there’s nothing melancholy about it. They take pleasure in being together, realizing they had forgotten each other.

The screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière and I began from a simple concept: the fact that we very often doubt our feelings.

And this doubt is expressed by voice-overs. I chose voice-over because it’s a device unique to cinema, as well as one I simply have a great affection for, almost in the way one loves a particular type of music.

The subject is quite ordinary; the dramatic interest hinges on the fact that the audience, with no access to the characters’ feelings, can project whatever it wants onto them. I imagined the lead character as an innocent, someone who is constantly being reborn. He is amazed by everything, in the style of the great heroes of the silent era, like Buster Keaton, who doesn’t try to find out happened when a flowerpot falls on his head, but rather wonders if he is bleeding.

If in literature you have the short story and the novel, I would like to build this film like a short story: a short film, offbeat, surprising and fresh, the antithesis of a heavy psychological drama.

In essence, it is a contemporary comedy of manners.