Twenty-year-old David lives in the moment. He juggles a variety of different odd jobs and continues to put off, just for a while longer, the time to make more serious decisions. This solitary daydreamer succumbs to the charm of Lena, a newly arrived neighbour. But the relaxed pace of his life shifts up a gear when his elder sister is brutally killed in an attack. He must then take charge of his seven-year-old niece, Amanda. It is Mikhaël Hers’s third feature, following a sweetly feckless twenty-something jolted into adulthood (Vincent Lacoste) when tragedy appoints him the guardian of his seven-year-old niece, it tells a familiar story furrowed by quiet emotional conviction, much of it in Lacoste’s unhurried, unaffected turn. A nourishingly classical tear-jerker as well as a glowing valentine to Paris’s endurance in the age of modern terrorism.
