The Cost of Living
Une héritière qui n'arrive pas à hériter, un radin qui ne peut rien dépenser, un petit garçon qui trouve un billet dans la rue, un restaurateur prodigue qui ne fait que donner... Tels sont, entre autres, les personnages de ce film "choral". Pourquoi certains dépensent-ils de manière convulsive là où d'autres retiennent l'argent comme la partie la plus vitale de leur être ? On croit parler d'argent, mais c'est d'amour dont il s'agit.
Philippe Le Guay
Also Directed by Philippe Le Guay
Camille Prader, back from a physicians' meeting, is waiting for his suitcase on the Airport conveyor belt. Clémentine, his girlfriend of the day, has come to fetch him. With a radiant smile, she tells Fabrice that she left everything to live with him. When Camille picks a case he realizes ha has taken the wrong one. The label shows it belongs to a musician called Juliette Graveur. Hegrasps the occasion to run away from Clémentine by claiming Juliette is his mistress....
La vie est bien ingrate pour François Berthier : un chien hurle toute la nuit et l'empêche de dormir, la machine a café lui explose au visage, il pleut, le chef de bureau à la banque l'humilie et le menace de renvoi. Et puis, du jour au lendemain, tout ce qui était violent ou pénible pour François se transforme comme par miracle. Que se passe-t-il ? Pourquoi le monde devient-il si brusquement doux
At the Mêle sur Sarthe, a small Norman village, farmers are affected by a crisis. Georges Balbuzard, the mayor of the city, is not one to let them down and decides to try everything to save his village ...
Serge Tanneur (Fabrice Luchini) is at the pinnacle of his acting career when he decides to turn his back on show business and become a hermit living off of France’s Atlantic coast. Three years later, Gauthier Valence (Lambert Wilson), a beloved TV actor, shows up on the island to offer Serge a role in his directorial debut – a rendition of Molière’s classic play, “The Misanthrope”. Serge refuses at first, but then suggests that they rehearse the first scene and after five days he’ll decide if he wants to dothe play or not. What ensues is a battle of brawn and wits and peculiar encounters with a hotel maid who longs to be a pornstar and an Italian divorcée.
The name of painter Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732-1806) is synonymous for a kind of painting style which celebrates carefree romantic life, indoors and out. He was a painter during the final decades of the French monarchy. In this story, he and his brother Cyprien (Robin Renucci), who is an early pioneer in medical anatomy (he dissected corpses and made drawings of what he found in them), have fallen in love with the same woman, Marianne (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu), a laundress. This attraction has not escaped the notice of Salmon d'Anglas (Sami Frey), a conniving nobleman, who has his heart set on getting revenge on Jean-Honore (Joachim de Almeida) for refusing his patronage and becoming the darling of the French court.
'Night Shift' really knocked me out. I hesitate to call it a thriller, I suppose psychological drama is the more apt description, but it packs in more tension and suspense than 90% of today's Hollywood thrillers. I was hooked from the outset, and the film held me in its grip until the closing scene. Refreshingly set in a blue collar background, something Hollywood very rarely (if ever!) does anymore, it's a simple story of a nice guy/family man Pierre (Gerald Laroche) who moves to a new section of the factory he works at and begins the night shift.
Paris, in the early 1960s. Jean-Louis Joubert is a serious but uptight stockbroker, married to Suzanne, a starchy class-conscious woman and father of two arrogant teenage boys, currently in a boarding school. The affluent man lives a steady yet boring life. At least until, due to fortuitous circumstances, Maria, the charming new maid at the service of Jean-Louis' family, makes him discover the servants' quarter on the sixth floor of the luxury building he owns and lives in. There live a crowd of lively Spanish maids who will help Jean-Louis to open to a new civilization and a new approach of life. In their company - and more precisely in the company of beautiful Maria - Jean-Louis will gradually become another man, a better man.
Although he's now eighty years old, Claude Lherminier is still as imposing as he ever was. But his bouts of forgetfulness and confusion are becoming increasingly frequent. Even so, he stubbornly refuses to admit that anything is wrong. Carole, his oldest daughter, wages a daily and taxing battle to ensure that he's not left on his own. Claude suddenly decides on a whim to go to Florida. What lies behind this sudden trip?