Anne is a theatre director. She has separated from her husband and is moving house. She is dull, without desires. She meets Ben, a helpful neighbour and jobless actor. He looks at her with passionate eyes; she never wants to tie herself to a man again. But when she decides to stage Zola's “L'assommoir”, it is to him that she proposes the role of Coupeau, casting herself in the one of Gervaise. As the story unfolds, the boundary between real life and the play becomes increasingly blurred; Between readings and rehearsals, between research and study, reality fades into fiction, and the two seem to retrace exactly all the steps of Coupeau and Gervaise's story, all the way to ruin.

-- Dir. Gianluca Matarrese - 104min - 2023 - France, Italy --

"Art and life fuse deliriously.....It is as if the border between performance and life has entirely collapsed." - Guardian

"something magical happened. These two worlds, the world of their lives and the world of the novel, mixed together giving birth to something…in between. We were all lost in this. We didn’t know anymore if we were talking to the character in the novel or if it was Anne in real life.” - Matarrese talking to Business Doc Europe

"Slowly pulling us into a vortex of emotions, actions, readings, rants, clashes, fights and kisses, the film acts as a game of mirrors which fluctuates between various narrative planes and where Zola’s writing resonates with present distortions." - Cineuropa

"The ambiguous play within a play contributes to the realization that there may actually be no distinction between reality and fiction. This inevitably leads to the question: what role are we playing ourselves?" - IDFA