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Inspired by Andre Breton’s semi-autobiographical novel, Nadja (1928), Tires Velvet Paws begins as an homage to Surrealism, before turning into a reckoning with the movement’s treatment of women, madness, and artistic desire.
The film blends slow-moving tableaux, classical music, and fragments of Breton’s text into a dreamlike portrait of Paris, guided more by mood and intuition than conventional narrative.
Andre moves through Paris searching for beauty, chance encounters, and something — or someone — to “haunt.” At a flea market, he meets the enigmatic young woman, Nadja, whose emotional intensity becomes the object of his fascination. Declaring herself “a soul in limbo” she embodies the Surrealist ideal of the muse untethered from ordinary reality.
As the story unfolds, Nadja begins to unravel. Ominous visions appear to her – glowing windows, flaming hands, deserted gardens, and haunted landscapes. The film darkens into an oneiric portrait of psychological unraveling, culminating in her confinement to a psychiatric hospital. Andre’s account ends with the line “beauty will be convulsive or not at all”, treating her more as an object of fascination than a person to be cared for.
In the third act, the film imagines Nadja twenty years later, not as an abstract muse, but as a real woman. The disclosure in 2002 of Nadja’s true identity, as Léona-Camille-Ghislaine Delcourt, long denied and erased by history, inspired filmmaker Don Freeman to create his own ending. In the final scene, Nadja reads from Delcourt’s actual letters to Breton, “I feel like a dove wounded by the lead she carries within herself.” The film becomes an elegy for the woman behind one of Surrealism’s most enduring characters.
Directed by Don Freeman (USA)