Frédérique Charbonneau

In Paris at night, a young aspiring filmmaker grapples with heartbreak after his girlfriend leaves him for his best friend. After a failed attempt to confront his friend, he wanders the streets and encounters a girl who has just been abandoned. Their paths cross at a party, bringing together two tormented souls.

The name of painter Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) is synonymous for a kind of painting style which celebrates carefree romantic life, indoors and out. He was a painter during the final decades of the French monarchy. In this story, he and his brother Cyprien (Robin Renucci), who is an early pioneer in medical anatomy (he dissected corpses and made drawings of what he found in them), have fallen in love with the same woman, Marianne (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), a laundress. This attraction has not escaped the notice of Salmon d'Anglas (Sami Frey), a conniving nobleman, who has his heart set on getting revenge on Jean-Honore (Joachim de Almeida) for refusing his patronage and becoming the darling of the French court.

The painter Honoré Fragonard lives in a sort of beehive surrounded by attractive female models, of which Marianne, his mistress and muse, is the queen. Around her, these young ladies are constantly arguing about which of them will be the next to pose for Honoré. The routine breaks down when one of the young women suddenly dies. Her corpse is then dissected by Cyprien Fragonard under the eyes of his cousin Honoré, who paints the execution of the operation. Marianne, fascinated by this morbid spectacle, also watches.