About the film

Synopsis

A body is found on the floor of a museum. The victim has been thought to have been murdered. The victim's body lies in a salon of a museum with no possible way to have been placed there. After some confusion, the improbability of the crime, and the oddness surrounding it, leads to a Paris Police forensic criminologist, and their protégé, to investigate. Henri, the protégé, after some fruitless leads, begins hunting around the museum, and discovers that the improbable is possible, where the lines between our world and the world of Art are blurred.

With some investigation, delving into the world of Paris 1914, one he was unfamiliar with, Henri, leaves our world and enters the world of art, where the brushstrokes of artists have created what at first sight seems an idyllic world. However, this world is under attack, its environment being destroyed from within, by the sinister Oberon Drant, and his growing army. They are determined to invade our world. Henri is under pursuit and coming to terms with the world he is in. Henri becomes entangled with the beautiful Madame Jeanne Max, seduced by her beauty and the world containing her. He realises his mission is to escape back to our world, and prevent Drant’s ambitions. However is mesmerised by each connected artwork that he travels through and eventually trapped in an art-hell.

This disturbance gives Drant and his cronies the momentum to get into our world, to take what they think they have been denied; reality. Their ideology is rooted in the classic, in perfection. Already resentful of what their world has become, they aim to leave it for ours, infecting it with hate, cynicism and war, destroying what is left of the romantics' ideals, and giving birth to a new technological age of radio, film and war and machines but under their ideals of perfection. Henri must decide whether to forsake the newfound utopia or save our world.

The climax arrives within the walls of the museum as the artworks come to life and do battle, sculptures, characters from artworks fight, thunder and turbulence, stars reel, colours clash, peasants rise and gods fall in a spectacle of the sublime and the ordinary. Drant and his legion must be stopped from leaving the museum and getting into the city.

Art prevails, a few characters escape, but our world is saved, Drant is defeated. Henri wraps the museum, the antagonists, and the art-world up into itself, preventing their invasion. However, Henri is separated from Madame Jeanne forever, left only with the memories and a painting, having to resolve to live a life in pain, but in reality.

An escapee (Villain), from the museum battle had managed to escape through the Paris night. His mission is set. It is Drant’s last card to play, Raoul Villain arrives at a cafe, raises a gun and assassinates the pacifist leader, Jean Jaures. France declares war. World War One effectively begins. An Italian newspaper publishes an illustration of the event and this is the first wirephoto that is sent globally, ushering in a new age of imagery. Film, Radio follow. Art is dead.