La bailarina

A Parisian encounters an old acquaintance who, from the outset, denies his identity. The fleeting reunion awakens in him the memory of a vanished city: the Paris of his youth, inhabited by figures with hazy pasts, echoing with violence, exile, and guilt. Those survivors, inevitably marginal and mysterious, resurface in his mind fifty years later "like drowned bodies rising to the surface of the Seine." Among them all, the memory of a dancer stands out, spinning endlessly, like a music box, to the rhythm of a fragmented memory. She and her son, Pierre, become the focus of a retrospective and melancholic search for his own identity, for his "beginnings in life": a period evoked through mists, made up of nightclubs and cramped rooms, clandestine passions and unsettling reappearances.