Occupation. Resistance. Liberation.
In love, as in war, the first casualty is truth.
PARIS, 1942
Swastikas on the Eiffel Tower, jackboots in the Champs-Elysées,
translucent blue paint on the streetlights.
Frustrated by the Nazi Propaganda Ministry’s repeated censorship of his cynical detective films, stylish French movie producer Xavier Prévost (56) decides to make an elaborate fairy tale.
And he has just the right fairy tale in mind. When he was nineteen, and a mere paperhanger, he became deeply infatuated with Céleste Lavisse, a match-baron’s sublimely beautiful daughter. It was for Céleste that he penned La Rose parfaite, a La Belle et la bête-type romantic fantasy set in a rose-growing kingdom overrun by an ogre and his goblins. A story that, by sheer coincidence, has remarkable allegorical relevance to the situation in Occupied France.
So as Prévost goes about mobilizing the talent, finances and resources to shoot his daring love story ... as he juggles a black market brother, a Resistant son, a volatile ex-lover and a clandestine writer who may or may not be Jewish ... as he does all this, and as he repeatedly assures suspicious Propaganda Ministry officials that the film is “just a love story”, Prévost is compelled to review again his mysteriously thwarted romance with Céleste Lavisse, and to reflect upon all the things he did not allow himself to believe, and all the things he did not permit himself to say.
This is the story of The Inexpressible.
To contact the author please email anthony@anthonyoneill.net