Bewitched by a bohemian way of life, Anatols Imermanis wished for his ashes to be scattered along the streets of the red light district in Paris. Since the writer’s passing in the late 1990s, his mortal remains are nowhere to be found, so the wish remains unfulfilled. Now, Imermanis has acquired a private detective of his life and poetry in the shape of Alexander Zapol a.k.a. Semyon Khanin. The advocate of his will touches upon immortality that remains in between book covers and with us, mortals. As Imermanis himself would say, this is a veritable crime story.

In true Chabrol fashion, the poet Zapol hits the streets of Riga, calling up literary figures and drifting into surreal, sensual poetic encounters straight out of Rohmer’s work. The spirit of Brenčs, the Latvian crime drama classic behind the Iron Curtain, pops up here and there. It all makes sense – Imermanis is one of the pioneers of the detective genre in Latvia. The affection of director Ābele for the French New Wave in this hybrid piece is infectious – it forgoes the gentle restraint of a biopic; we never know what MacGuffin he’ll throw at the viewer next. Meanwhile, screenwriter Jānis Joņevs doesn’t lean on Riga being the “Little Paris” – instead, he leads us into the memories of Soviet literary circles and erotic, biographical secrets of which we know so little.