Lázaro, Luisa and Francisco, in their forties, live in Mexico City. Friends, they also form a loving trio. Nothing gives it away, as their exchanges are emptied of any affection. Prosaic, contradictory, repetitive, they diffuse a slight unease as much as they produce a comic effect. The first movement of Lázaro de noche shows their ordinary daily life punctuated by comical casting scenes, for a film about which we will know nothing, except the method of its director to audition them: observation. With Lázaro de noche , Nicolás Pereda continues his enterprise initiated more than fifteen years ago with his faithful community of actor friends. He brings them together in a mutant film with an unparalleled tone, in which he articulates images of the banal and the marvelous, and thereby explores the limits of realism, inspired by the words of the Argentinian writer César Aira. During a dinner that brings together the three protagonists, a change of camera angle and the emergence of a voice from the past plunge the film into another space-time, that of memory. Barely have they met in a writing workshop and the beginnings of their ballet of love been sketched out, when the evocation of the tale of Aladdin written at the time by Luisa projects the story into a third level of fiction and representation. Lázaro and his mother Teresita now embody Aladdin and his mother, in a profane variation of the tale, a fairy tale of raw triviality. If, over the course of its transformations, Lázaro de noche moves away from reality – from reality to memory, from memory to tale – it is without sacrificing any of its tangible materiality; the film seems to become disenchanted as it re-enchants itself. And if reading Aladdin is surprising - because, by making the same wish for food repeatedly, the hero "refuses to make the causal leap of magic and chooses the step by step of reality" (César Aira) -, Nicolás Pereda, himself, invites us to find the magic in this same step by step.