Jacob Obus is a 75-year-old jazz musician whose fame is matched only by the singularity of his instruments. Each instrument is carved in the image of a woman’s body and designed to be played in a way that is more intimate than conventional performance. He speaks to no model, never breaks the emotional distance, and instead channels his music into a ritual of breath, touch, and careful, almost reverent engagement with the bodies that shape his sound. The sounds he conjures are unlike anything the world has heard, and yet the spectacle he creates on stage is hollow without a single spoken word. That quiet is tested when a new presence enters his orbit.
Avril will not be turned away. She approaches Obus with a steadiness that promises contact, and she intends to experience him fully—inside and out. In a reversal of power, she becomes the active force on the table: the artist who set the stage, danсing between photographer and subject, stripping away the mystique that has kept Obus isolated for so long. In his moment of exposure, he finally confesses that the love he performs on stage is a ruse, a performance that has kept him apart from real intimacy because he has never truly connected with a woman. The revelation shakes him, but Avril is moved rather than repelled, and a fragile bond begins to form between them. Complicating matters, Avril is also having an affair with Obus’s instrument concept artist, Arthur, a younger man who challenges the drag of risk and status in their lives and pushes back against a world that might demand a solitary devotion to art over human love.
Meanwhile, the story threads into a broader orbit. We glimpse conversations with the world’s first Marsonaute crew—travelers who push toward a neighboring planet at relativistic speeds, and who are shown live as they negotiate time dilation that should bend the rules of experience. The mathematics of time becomes a visual chorus, a chorus that longs to reconcile human feeling with physics. Back on Earth, Eugène Spaak—Arthur’s father and longtime friend of Jacob—advances his own theories about Mars, building new instruments in a makeshift laboratory and insisting that music, women, and the mysteries of the universe are inextricably linked.
As love slowly takes root, the plot’s gravity shifts: Avril teleports toward Mars to become the planet’s first woman Marsonaute. A capsule at last provides the possibility of her voyage, a moment that deepens Obus’s longing and forces a reckoning with loss. He receives the instrument modeled after Avril, yet discovers that it cannot be played alone. What he needs is Arthur’s partnership, a shared embrace that would allow two lovers to reach the same woman without owning her. Together, their collaboration becomes the hinge of the story—music as trust, desire as a bridge, and art as a shared instrument rather than a monopoly.
The journey culminates in a liminal space—inside one of the instruments, or perhaps inside the Red Planet itself—where Obus must decide whether to trust in love and in the bond of Avril and Arthur to counter loneliness. The finale lingers on whether what has unfolded is a death poem or a love song played by the whole band, but the emotional logic remains clear: the tale is a meditation on sacrifice for love, a bittersweet alchemy that refuses easy redemption.
Viewed against its modest production scale, the film Mars et Avril shines with a tangible ingenuity. The visuals were crafted on limited resources, with a dedicated crew that often worked at volunteer levels, and the appearance of Robert Lepage in a starring role elevates the project in a way that critics and audiences alike have found astonishing. Director Martin Villeneuve’s remarkable achievement has inspired broader conversations, including a TED talk titled Martin Villeneuve: How I made an impossible film (2013), which foregrounds the audacity and craft behind the work. The film ultimately remains a poignant, almost operatic meditation on love, invention, and the loneliness that music and fame can mask.
