Drawing on the director’s well-documented passion for film history, this latest work from Bertrand Tavernier is an homage to the filmmakers of the 1940s, who struggled to keep the French film industry alive under German occupation. Tavernier developed his screenplay from conversations with two key figures of the era, who become the protagonists of his dramatic film: Jean Devaivre, a champion cyclist who worked as an assistant director for Maurice Tourneur at Continental Films, the Nazi-run film studio, and Jean Aurenche, the acclaimed screenwriter of Occupe-toi d’Amélie and Forbidden Games who was instrumental in helping to launch Tavernier’s career in the 1970s. The two figures provide the film with an apt moral ambiguity as they struggle, alternately, with their complicity and resistance to the German occupiers and create a delicate narrative balance that is played out in the contrast between Aurenche’s free-wheeling womanizing and Devaivre’s compromised loyalty to family and country.