Suzanne Osten based her first feature film on the life of her mother, a film critic and writer who was herself obsessed with the idea of making a feature film during the war years. The film's English (and original) title is taken from a quote by French poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert. But in Paris of 1939, where, as the film opens, Gerd (Malin Ek) has come to interview Jean-Louis Barrault, romantic fatalism is giving way to just fatalism. Gerd falls in with a group of German refugee filmmakers, and in love with a French soldier, but like much in her life, these will come to naught. Back in Sweden, her attempts to convince her artist friends and the national film branch of the efficacy of her war period film are futile. The war droning on, divorce, and the effort to raise her daughter lead Gerd into small breakdowns that only foreshadow her demise in 1944, when she suffered from incurable mental illness (she died in 1952). Osten evokes an almost surreal mood, employing period detail and personal perception to recreate her mother's life; her insights into the milieu of artists-always uneasy, doubly so in an uneasily neutral country during the war-have both a witty and tragic dimension.