This Sweet Sickness

David works as an accountant and says he is visiting his parents every weekend. In fact he is restoring a house he bought in the country, alone and stone by stone. He is doing it for Lise: the woman he has loved since childhood lives nearby, and she is married. David believes that one day the two of them will live in that house. Claude Miller's French film is adapted from a novel by Patricia Highsmith. Gérard Depardieu plays David and Miou-Miou plays Lise. The telling does not present obsession as love; it shows step by step how the world David has built loses its hold on the real one. Highsmith's usual subject is here too: the lie an ordinary man tells himself.