Director Javier Rebollo’s first feature, shot in French and in Spanish, is a visually provocative tale of a conventional loner who becomes a silent voyeur obsessed by desire and an impossible love.
Leon is a youngish man who lives in an apartment in an unexciting part of Paris, where he seems to do no work but look after his bed-ridden mother. For fun, he prises his neighbours’ letters out of the apartment block’s letterboxes or goes to insignificant train stations to watch unknown passengers come and go. This quietly pursued activity is kept at a low level until a noisy Spanish woman, Dolores (Spanish actress Lola Dueñas, last seen in Volver) also known as Lola, moves into the flat next door. Lola is bold and irresistible to the lacid Leon. He starts writing a diary of the minute details of her life, her daily activities, her ups and downs. Quietly, and for years, their separate lives run in a shadowy and eventually dangerous parallel.