Claire,¹ in her fifties, is a recently divorced woman. Her husband left her to openly pursue an amorous relationship with her young niece. Claire finds solace in the arms of Ludo, a lover with whom she enjoys a fulfilling sexual experience. She is secretly attached to this lover, who leaves her without a word after a torrid night. Shaken by the abrupt end of what she imagined to be an idyllic romance, she decides to spy on him. To do so, she creates a fake profile on Facebook and steals the most beautiful photos of her hated niece. She is now transformed and rejuvenated into a 24-year-old woman named Clara. This new avatar immediately seduces Alex, Ludo's flatmate. Trapped in her new identity, Claire sinks into fantasy and superimposes a life onto Clara's photo. Their romantic correspondence intensifies and hooks Claire's desire despite herself.
She constantly logs onto her Messenger app to check messages from the person who is about to steal her heart. She becomes a catfish and uses her fictitious identity to live out, to her great surprise, an amorous relationship that her initial lie will make impossible.
The phenomenon of catfishing, literally 'catfish technique,' is a process commonly referred to as such since the documentary film of the same name directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman in 2010. The directors follow Yaniv's virtual relationship with a woman who turns out not to be who he thinks she is.
The catfish metaphor is taken from a collection of essays by Henry Wood Nevinson, in which the author describes the lethargic state of cod caught in Europe and brought back alive across the Atlantic. A genius fisherman hadCATF the intuition that this naturally apathetic fish needed a stimulant to keep it lively. So, he came up with the idea of introducing a catfish into each of the ship's fish tanks, which enabled him to present them as lively and fresh at the market.

^[1] Claire Milaud is the main character in the French film, Celle que vous croyez, co-written and directed by Safy Nebbou, released in 2019. It is an adaptation of the novel of the same name by Camille Laurens, published in 2016 by Gallimard.
^[2] H.W. Nevinson, Essays in Rebellion, London: Nisbet & Co., 1913, available online: Gutenberg.org.