Marieke, Marieke

MARIEKE is 20. She’s living a double life: during the day, she works in a chocolate factory. At night she immerges in a secret world of eccentric love that she shares with much older men and more particularly with HARRY. Only in her sensual photographs of those affairs does she begin to explore her deepest fears. She lives with her mother JEANNE, an emotionally distant woman hardened by life.

The arrival in Brussels of JACOBY, an editor living in Berlin, disrupts this precarious balance.
Jacoby is searching for the last manuscript of Marieke’s father, a commercially unsuccessful writer whose work is only now becoming critically recognized. But Marieke’s mother denies the existence of any book, just as she has always concealed the truth of his suicide from her daughter.

Jacoby and Marieke are drawn together by a common quest. Their search reopens old wounds, awakening repressed memories and animating images of the father she lost too soon.

No longer willing to hide her emotions, Marieke reaches out for understanding. But he misinterprets her awkward attempts to love, refusing to be another of her older lovers, unaware that her feelings for him are genuine. The most important people in her life reject her. Her mother blocks the memory of her late husband and loses her grip on reality.

Humbled and rejected, with the truth of her father’s end laid bare and her dreams shattered, Marieke sabotages the luxury chocolate factory where she works then recklessly tempts death. Will life triumph over denial, lies and self-destruction? These are the questions to be answered as Marieke lies in a hospital bed.