'The David Zimmerman Affair': An intimate thriller about a foreign body

On the night of December 31st, David Zimmerman's life turns upside down. He's a shy, rather antisocial thirty-something photographer living in Paris. That day, he lets his only friend drag him to a crowded party. There, he notices an enigmatic woman, whom he remembers photographing at a wedding, and can't help but follow her. The next day, when he wakes up, he finds himself trapped inside that woman's body. Zimmerman tries to find her so he can perhaps turn things around. He begins a frantic race to recover his body while discovering new and disturbing surprises.

The David Zimmerman Case (Astiberri, translated by Rubén Lardín) is a fast-paced graphic novel, an ambitious Hitchcockian thriller written by brothers Arthur Harari and Lucas Harari. It has a powerful opening and manages to sustain that interest until the very end, never flagging. A story so suggestive and full of plot twists that it's impossible not to get caught up in these 360 ​​pages that fly by like a breath.

The story takes as its starting point a theme that is not new in the realm of fantasy: body swapping. Aware of this, the authors joke about these references in one scene, and thus, by critiquing the comic from within the comic itself, they demonstrate both their wit and the care taken in their work. But the greatness of The David Zimmerman Affair is that from this premise it manages to construct a great and original story. As Lucas Harari explains, the objective was to go beyond this body swap and "return the fantastic to its original dimension: the irruption of a magical effect into reality, in the manner of Kafka's The Metamorphosis or Jirō Taniguchi's The Distant Neighborhood ."

This quote allows us to comment on another of the virtues of this comic book: its ability to set in motion a range of visual and narrative references that, regardless of whether the reader knows them or not - that will not prevent them from being captivated by the story - contribute to giving depth to the tale, to making this proposed entity, to the point of becoming a very solid album, capable of seducing far beyond its addictive plot to the point of hypnotizing us also through the drawings, through the portrait it paints of Paris or through the effectiveness of its narration in vignettes.

Lucas Harari cites Kafka and Taniguchi among his references. We could add other names whose work finds echo in these pages. From the drawing style, the types of shots, the appearance and attitudes of the characters, it is inevitable to think of Daniel Clowes ( author of Monica or Like a Velvet Glove Forged in Iron ) and even Charles Burns ( Labyrinths ), although without falling into the latter's darker side.

On the other hand, the portrayal of Paris and its ability to evoke places inevitably recall the Frenchman Jacques Tardi, who best captured Paris , in albums like those of Néstor Burma or Juegos para morir (Games for Dying ). There even seems to be a nod in the drawing of some of the houses or in Tardi's way of placing messages on the walls that peek out behind the characters. Here too, in a vignette of The David Zimmerman Affair, we see a large piece of graffiti on a wall that reads: "Free Gaza."

The Hararis have succeeded in the original development of the plot, in the pauses, in those silent vignettes that add density, a special tempo, and a particular charm to the story. They have managed to portray a contemporary Paris, yet far removed from the postcard clichés, a Paris tinged with a range of cold colors very appropriate to the tone required by this story, which introduces strangeness into the everyday. Halfway between a thriller and a crime novel, The David Zimmerman Affair blends the natural and the supernatural to construct a story that can also be read as a reflection on otherness and on the possibility, or lack thereof, of loving beyond physical appearance.

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Lucas Harari (Paris, 1990) had already made a name for himself in Spain with a celebrated solo work ( The Last Rose of Summer , 2022) and is now teaming up with his brother for the first time to co-write the script for The David Zimmerman Affair . Arthur Harari (Paris, 1981) is a filmmaker and has co-written two films; the most recent is Anatomy of a Fall (2023), which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, a Golden Globe, an Oscar and a César for Best Original Screenplay.