Pictures of Baby Jane Doe

Horace is a down-on-his-luck writer and part-time bartender scraping by in New York City. One night at the bar he works, he meets Jane — a young, drug-addicted streetwalker who is brash, rude, and desperate for her next fix. Despite the unpromising circumstances, the two quickly fall into a volatile romance. Horace begins photographing Jane in macabre tableaux, staging her as women who suffered violent deaths, which reflects both his artistic obsessions and the dark undercurrent of their relationship. Jane moves in with him, having previously been squatting in a derelict building, and the couple attempts to build something together — relocating at one point to Atlantic City in a bid to start fresh. Their relationship is marked by constant turbulence: moments of genuine tenderness and connection interrupted by Jane's worsening heroin addiction and Horace's own psychological demons. The film tracks their codependent spiral downward, culminating in Jane overdosing and dying — a fate the film frames as the tragic endpoint of her short, troubled life. The story is reputedly based on the real-life girlfriend of director Paul Peditto, who died in 1983; the film is presented as an elegy to her memory, emphasising the fragility and beauty of a damaged life rather than sensationalising its squalor.

Sources: French Wikipedia, Letterboxd (user reviews), Web search snippets (IMDb/search metadata)