The Zero Sum Game

January 1943; a Paris nightclub. A transvestite singer accepts an offer to sing once a week at a club in the artsy district of the city, and in so doing starts a chain-reaction of personal turbulence for many characters that come within her circle of influence; turbulence that mirrors the relationship that France and Germany have developed by the end of the war. The club owner, a sharp business woman who has returned to Paris not only to snap up businesses failing because of the war, but also to find a man from her past and take revenge for his role in destroying the love she had with her fiancé in college. Aside from revenge, her life goals are to assist with the resistance by supplying information, and make money. She is satisfied with the money that the transvestite singer's popular show brings into the club, but is concerned by the feelings from her past that surface.The intoxicating appeal of the transvestite singer will cause the district mayor to see in her the haunting female that he has been in love with every since his first sexual experience. The two of them will develop a mutual passion via an exchange of intelligent and intense correspondence. It will also excite the buried and obsessive lust of a top officer of the German Intelligence currently stationed in Paris.Because the transvestite singer is the antithesis of the innocent and fresh French girls the German officer and his drunk friends raped two decades prior, causing them to hastily join the German military, he can finally suppress the guilt that has always prevented him from falling in love. The German officer's unraveling happens because of various reasons. Not only is he competing against the district mayor for the love of the transvestite singer, but the resistance active in Paris takes advantage of his distraction to create a plan to eliminate some of the top VIP visitors from Berlin coming to Paris for the 1944 New Year's Eve party. The district mayor has a challenge played out in different scenarios - that of duplicity: he tries to maintain his relationships with both women that he loves - his loyal and genuine fiancé and the haunting and fantastical transvestite singer. He tries to stay loyal to his country, while also placating the occupiers. Further, he is maintaining specific fantasies, while maintaining his life as a morally fastidious public servant. Eventually the club owner realizes that he is the man she has come to destroy.At the New Year's Eve party of 1944 all of the characters come together: the German top officer in charge of security; the club owner, members of the resistance attempting to assassinate those VIP visitors from Berlin; the district mayor's fiance; the transvestite singer.As the evening edges closer to the dawn of a new year many realizations come to light. Any gains accrued by posturing are, in the end, cancelled out; a zero-sum game for all.