Les Passages

A film by Donna Vermeer

A year after a turbulent break-up gamine filmmaker Catherine flees New York for Paris, the city of her teenage dreams, remembering it as super-cool like 60s genre movies or mysterious and tragic like 19th century French novels. Hoping to lose herself in the anonymity of another city, she convinces her crew and her photographer daughter Claire to help her shoot her very American movie in Paris, because "Paris suburbs remind me of New Jersey". Upon arrival she sets out to invent both the New Jersey landscape of her childhood and the Paris (long out of fashion and memory) of the boulevards and snack bars and arcades, with poets in Montparnasse cafés and card games in the wooden galleries of the Palais-Royal. Throwing herself into the production of her movie by day and wandering the streets flâneur-like by night, she is determined to forget the past. But a chance meeting in the flea market at Clignancourt with the beautiful Anna, the actress playing her mother in her movie, sets her life, and heart, on another course.

As Catherine struggles with the ending of her film and Claire's increasing independence, Claire begins her own love affair – with Mathieu, the first Frenchman to pull up on a motorcycle and deconstruct the camera obscura. The film plays with time: the present, in which the story follows these three women as they form a complex love triangle; the past, through the window of childhood memory; history, always with us, always present; and the love story, which is out of time and which follows a path that is always possible to interpret according to a causality or a finality. Les passages allows us to enter two worlds – the one before us and the one that has vanished. Less concerned with plot than mood and emotion, this fragile story starts with a jolt, and ends with an affirmation.

Les Passages is about memory, and dreams, and false starts. It is inspired by Walter Benjamin's The Arcades Project, a collection of fragments about the 19th century Paris passages couverts and what he called "the fate of art".