Raphaël Confiant resurrects the glorious, mythical Paris of the Roaring Twenties, delicately depicting nostalgia for a lost paradise.

In the aftermath of the Great War, a new kind of music from the West Indies, the biguine, sweeps the whole of Paris, starting at the Bal de la rue Blomet in the heart of Montparnasse. Here, celebrities—Josephine Baker, Foujita, Hemingway, Desnos—mingle with unknowns and workers joyfully with intellectuals. Into this scene comes Anthénor Louis-Edmond, a black veteran of the Gallipoli campaign, soon meeting Frédéric Clerville, the young son of a brilliant lawyer from Fort de France, and Elise, a maid to former colonials. The fates of this trio, in search of true love or fleeting pleasure, will intertwine with those of other exiles like them, against a backdrop of the beguine and the mazurka.