A small restaurant in Montparnasse, Paris. Service is ending, and two artists cannot pay for their meal. Nobody knows yet that they will become famous. For now, there is just a woman who has worked all evening, and two men who owe her money.
She runs the restaurant. She counts, she feeds, she protects. For her, doing the accounts and taking care of people are the same gesture. She is not the naive landlady you might think.
The painter who knows every door, and above all every exit. He always stays close to the outside: he cannot bear to be held back.
The painter who always ends up going home to someone else's place, but who cannot bear to be held back either.
The main character is not a human being. It is the painting that is born on the restaurant wall that night. It does not speak, but everything revolves around it: what state it is in, who keeps it, what it is worth. Each scene must change at least one of these things. The humans pass; the painting stays, hidden but very much alive.
The game borrows its way of telling from three great filmmakers. You do not need to know them to play, but here is what each brings:
Every solution creates a new problem, and a very concrete detail always cuts short the big feelings.
Tenderness comes from what each already knows of the other, from having lived it (a moment apart, in the restaurant's storeroom).
Someone absent gets everyone talking, and everyone tells a different version. The witness who seems most reliable is sometimes the one with the most to hide.