A Perfect Man

Mathieu Vasseur (Niney) is a solitary, working-class nobody who dreams of becoming a novelist but whose lack of talent forces him to move boxes and furniture all day for a company that's often asked to empty the houses of dead people without any immediate family. In one such apartment, Mathieu finds a diary of a soldier who fought in Algeria and who clearly prepared and edited his work for publication. Mathieu, frustrated by the refusal of all of France's major literary houses to publish his own work and clearly aware that the man, like him, has no direct relatives, publishes the diary as the novel Black Sand and finds immediate success. The fact that he's only 25, and thus wasn't even born when the Algerian War happened, only makes his story more irresistible for both the press and the literary establishment.