- When an assistant to a daguerreotypy photographer falls in love with the latter's daughter the relationship mirrors the art form as love and pain combine.
- The young man Jean is hired as an assistant to the aging photographer Stéphane. Stéphane has abandoned commercial photography and is consumed by a project to take life-size pictures of his daughter Marie using the antiquated technique of daguerreotype. The project involves arduous exposure times of more than an hour, during which Marie must be fixed by a frame not to blur the picture.
As Jean works in the old house of Stéphane and Marie, he learns that Stéphane's wife, Denise, committed suicide after some illness and seems to haunt the house. Marie takes care of the greenhouse on the estate and dreams of becoming a professional gardener. She and Jean become lovers and Jean encourages her to leave her father and take up a position at the Botanical Gardens of Toulouse that she has been offered.
One day as Jean is having lunch in a restaurant, he is introduced to the real estate agent Thomas, who tries to convince Stéphane to sell the old house for a development project. Stéphane furiously rejects the offer, even though it involves a substantial sum.
One night the workshop is haunted by the ghost of Denise and Marie falls down the stairs and remains lifeless on the floor. Jean rushes her to hospital in his car, but she is thrown out of the car in an accident. When Jean looks for her body, he finds her conscious and seemingly well. They return to the house. Stéphane has assumed that Marie is dead and is overcome by grief. Jean convinces Marie to let Stéphane believe so, so that he can sell the house and Marie can move to Toulouse.
Marie moves in with Jean while Jean tries to find the deed to the house so that it can be sold. Eventually Stéphane again refuses to sell the house and Jean decides to forge his signature on a proxy. Thomas rejects the proxy and requires to see Stéphane in person. Back at the house Stéphane is overtaken by his grief and shoots himself. When the real estate agent arrives, he finds Jean with Stéphane's gun and blood on his hands. Stéphane shoots Thomas before he can alert anyone. He and Marie leave for Toulouse. On the way, they stop at a small church and engage in a kind of marriage ceremony in the empty church. The ceremony is interrupted by the priest who tells Jean that the church is closed and asks him to leave. Marie is nowhere to be seen and it becomes apparent that her entire presence after the accident has been a delusion.
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