The year is 1969. It’s the year of Woodstock, Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy. The location is Paris, still reeling from the student uprisings of May 1968; former critics Jean Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut and their colleages in the French New Wave are making beautiful, daring films that have changed cinema forever. Love, freedom and revolution are in the air.
Paul (Jeremy Davies) is a young, aspiring American filmmaker living and working in Paris. He spends his days in the cutting room, shaping mod, sexy sci-fi movies, but his true passion is his own work-in-progress – an earnest, idealistic cinema verité portrait of his daily life. Paul insists every frame of his film must be honest, a quality he’s unable to bring to his fizzling relationship with his Parisian girlfriend, Marlene (Elodie Bouchez). Paul’s obsession with his film bores and annoys her – it’s obvious that he loves his camera more than her and is more interested in chronicling his life than living it.
It’s when Paul is working as a film editor on Dragonfly that his life is turned upside-down. A futuristic spy tale set in then-distant year 2001, Dragonfly (the movie within the movie) stars Valentine (Angela Lindvall) as the gorgeous, skintight-pink-leather-clad heroine, with Billy Zane playing the sexy Mr. E. The mad, aging auteur Andrzej (Gerard Depardieu) is directing Dragonfly, and when his passion for its lead begins to cloud his judgment, the film’s hyperbolic, silver-haired producer Enzo (Giancarlo Giannini) orders him off the picture. Enzo and his right-hand man Fabrizio (Massimo Ghini) hire arrogant American wunderkind Felix De Marco (Jason Schwartzman) to take over the film. Paul is jealous of Felix’s fame, but his work with the pretentious hotshot is short-lived when Felix is in a car crash and must take a break from filmmaking. Enzo and Fabrizio then turn to Paul to save the film. Thrilled and terrified by this big break, Paul nervously accepts. As he gets ever more deeply involved in the completion of the film, the lines between real life and the plot of Dragonfly begin to blur. Eventually Paul not only survives the challenge of directing the film, but flourishes both artistically and personally. The great tide of youthful energy is everywhere, tearing down the old, demanding to be heard. It’s 1970, the dawn of a new decade. For Paul’s generation, the time has come...
