In a French mansion, a photographer is obsessed with reproducing long lost photos taken with the daguerreotype technique of yore. When he hires a young assistant for his project, things get complicated.
Written by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Catherine Paille, and Eléonore Mahmoudian and directed by Kurosawa, Daguerrotype is a very slow burn of a film that feels more like a drama than anything else. This being said, there are a few elements that will be surprising if the viewer goes into it completely blind and thus will not be spoiled here. Having the genre pre-established as anything other than drama will lead into guessing a few of these. Given the director and his resume, this aspect can be easily guessed. Here he works in a manner where the characters are given plenty of time to develop themselves and their arcs while the story builds around them. The writing and directing of the film feel like a proper mix of French and Japanese cinema in a way that is hard to explain but works wonderfully well here.
