When an assistant to a daguerreotypy photographer falls in love with the latter's daughter the relationship mirrors the art form as love and pain combine.
A former fashion photographer, Stephane works obsessively in an old 19th century photography technique, said to have given eternal after-life to the souls of the people whose image it captured. Jean, a young man desperate for inspiration in his life, becomes Stephane’s assistant. He quickly feels captured himself, by Marie, Stephane’s only daughter and model. But after Marie takes a mysterious fall one evening, the difference between image and reality becomes much harder to decipher.