Gradually, Lydu responds to Jean;s ardent nature and charm. But as she gets to know him, she becomes aware that his child-like, anarchic facade conceals a dark shadow that haunts his dreams, his memory, his imagination: the murder of his father (a notorious anarchist and pacifist during the First World War) in mysterious circumstances when he was a boy of 12. It's a legacy that gives Jean's personality a mercurial and reckless dimension and fuels his passion to make film in order to challenge the establishment and vindicate his father.

Finally, despite all Dr Gerard's efforts to persuade her against what he views as a dangerous liaison, Lydu commits to Jean and to a future beyond the institution on which she has become dependent. They escape from the sanatorium and are married in Nice. Neither Jean nor Lydu are fully cured of their illness and both are acutely aware of their mortality. Having survived despair and the ordeal of the sanatorium, they are determined to live what time they have to the full.But the love that enabled them to make their life-affirming choice will be tested and challenged to the limit as the narrative takes them from the joyful exuberance of their early married life in Nice, through dark and difficult times in Paris.

The forces that would undermind Jean and Lydu come in several forms, from within and without. The spectre of illness continues to cast a shadow over their joie de vivre. It is rare that they are both well at the same time, invariably one is sick whilst the other is well. The emotional and physical responsibility of always having to support one another puts immense pressure on them. This pressure is compounded by Jean's vocation - making films.

He starts as a runner at the Victorine Studios in Nice, eschewing the deadly world of factory film-making, he makes his own typically rebellious movie on the streets of the decadent capital of the Cote d'Azur. Finally he decides to try his luck in Paris, to no avail until a shrewd and wealthy amateur producer takes him under his wing and secures the funding for Jean to make two full-length films. But as Jean pursues this career, he is torn between his vocation and his marriage, between the group of like-minded friends who work with him and the woman on whom he depends, and who depends on him.

Jean's determination to succeed on his own terms inflicts on the couple periods of grinding hardship and povery, of separation and alienation - which in turn have an adverse effect on their health and well-being. Lastly, the relationship between the lovers is challenged by the demons from Jean's past, which are brought vividly into the present as Jean's work begins to make enemies amongst the same right-wing circles that had once been responsible for discrediting and murdering his father - and which are now casting a long shadow over 1930's Europe.

The first of Jean's two films is a thinly-veiled attack on the authoritarian forces who silenced his father. When it is banned by the state, Jean becomes increasingly absorbed with the idea of avenging his father's memory, and the distorting prism of his obsession threatens to undermine his marriage - just as it once destroyed Jean's relationship with his mother. A resolution to this troubled family heritage becomes imperative when Jean and Lydu themselves become parents to a daughter, Claire. Love appears to triumph and Jean's last film is a celebration of love's joys and sorrows. But while this celebration will last forever, captured on film, Jean and Lydu must now prepare to face the ultimate challenge: their own.