Inspired by the short story Aurélia (1854) by Gérard de Nerval, which will influence André Breton and the Surrealists, the film tells, with a contracted rhythm and visual accelerations / dilations, the daily experience of a woman projecting her into an interior dimension where reality and myth are mixed and fused by a dreamlike syntax. In the "descent into hell" of consciousness, Aurélia ends up by detaching herself from her identity as a woman of today to take on the multiple features prefigured, from time to time, by her imagination. Aurélia's frenetic final dance serves as a ceremony to exorcise evil, the furious rediscovery of the “double” savage buried within each of us, the abrupt awakening of the possessed bacchant, liberated vitalism, myth, explosion of fantastic energies. Aurélia faces a discourse on filmic time: real time is decomposed analyzed accelerated in lightning-fast mental paths from a stream of consciousness.
