The Story

Veronica Berg, from Tenafly, New Jersey, has everything she needs to make her dream of becoming a painter come true: a home with a studio in the picturesque south of France and a nanny who watches her two-year-old twins. Yet instead of painting, she spends her days lingering over meaningless chores and secretly indulging in a two-hour nap.

When her hard-working, Moroccan-born husband grows impatient with her aimlessness and challenges her to help solve a minor financial problem by selling a painting, she must find a way to break out of the dangerous yet seductive rut she’s slipped into.

Against the backdrop of the mistral wind battering Provence’s beauty and rising anti-Semitic sentiment in France triggered by the impending Iraq war, her quest triggers an astonishing, often comical journey that reveals depression’s sunny mask and the dark side of privilege and security.