“I was interested in filming things that I’d really experienced. I wrote a very precise script in three parts built around my job and my nocturnal life, always in the shadows.”
 
Marie-Claude Treilhou became part of the Diagonale circle through her friend and fellow critic Gérard Frot-Coutaz, and was soon working as an assistant director for Paul Vecchiali, before she received a small advance that, combined with Diagonale funding, allowed her to make her first film.
 
For Simone Barbès, Treilhou drew on her experience as an usher in a porn cinema, casting her colleague Ingrid Bourgoin as the title character and shooting in the very theatre she had worked in. A triptych depicting a night in Montparnasse, the film begins with Simone and her fellow usher’s mordant dealings with the eccentric clientele at the cinema, before moving to a surrealistic lesbian bar where, waiting for her girlfriend, Simone is faced with Amazonian swordswomen, punk poets, and a barman who recites Racine. In the film’s final sequence, Simone hitches a ride with an older man, who soon lets her take the wheel. As the dawn approaches, the motley pair begin to let their guards down.  
 
Perhaps more than any other film the company produced, Simone Barbès epitomised Diagonale’s interest in the people and places that French cinema had hitherto ignored. Rooted in an underground social world that had all but vanished by the end of the eighties, the film is a fantasia on what occurs between sunset and sunrise in the parts of cities the camera rarely sees.