Nelly Borgeaud
Odile is a business executive looking for a new, bigger apartment. Her younger sister Camille has just completed her doctoral thesis in history and is a Paris tour guide. Simon is a regular on Camille's tours because he's attracted to her. Camille has fallen for Marc, and they begin an affair. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, since he hopes to eventually have his family join him in Paris.
Tina is a young warehousewoman in a supermarket. She is in love with Fred but still lives at her mother Nadine's. When Nadine dies, Tina looks for meeting her father Ludovic, who she never knew. But she first meets her half-sister Lise, and Constantin, the unusual Ludovic's lawyer.
In Nazi-occupied Paris, a young accompanist named Sophie Vasseur gets a job with famed singer Irene Brice. As Irene's husband Charles, a businessman collaborating with the Nazis, wrestles with his conscience, Sophie becomes obsessed with Irene, taking on the role of maid as well as accompanist, living life vicariously through Irene's triumphs and affairs.
The teacher Odile Langlois starts her new job in the elementary school of a small French town. She is elegant and mysterious - but most of all, she is very friendly to her new students, whose confidence she gains so quickly. On the contrary, however, Odile's unconventional, alternative way of teaching does not appeal to some colleagues and parents who do everything to get rid of the young teacher ...
A death in the family. Patrick dies and his three sisters gather at their parents' home in Normandy. Anne, the oldest, is steady, married with two children, showing little emotion. Isabelle, who's cut herself off from her family for eight years, returns from Paris. Claude, Patrick's twin and still a student, grieves for her other half. Along with their parents, each must face family grievances first before they can grieve together for Patrick. Then comes the revelation of how he died, and new feelings come to the fore. Can a death help a family to heal, coax an aging mother back to sanity, bring a couple into each other's arms, and enable two sisters to grow?
Two physicians, one old and one young, fall in love with the same woman, Juliette, a quixotic hairdresser. First, she is with Raoul, the older one; then passion for Clément, the younger doctor, takes over. Raoul fights back, playing on Clément's guilt and Juliette's lack of self-assurance; then, Clément makes his case to Juliette, abandons his fiancée, and takes her to the provinces where he sets up practice and asks her to have a baby. She panics and abruptly leaves Clément, taking up with Raoul again. When she contracts Hodgkin's disease and the treatment does no good, Raoul believes she has the malady of love. Is there a cure?
In Passy, Paris, 1895. The young widow Hélène calls the doctor Henri Deberle during the night, when her daughter Jeanne suddenly gets breathless. Together they spend the night at the bedside, and it develops from a trusting encounter a love relationship. When the doctor Hélène one day confesses his love, the daughter comes from jealousy in another, life-threatening crisis. A film adaptation of the eponymous novel by Émile Zola, which addresses the social milieu of the bourgeois family in the "Second Empire".
Prof. Henri Laborit uses the stories of the lives of three people to discuss behaviorist theories of survival, combat, rewards and punishment, and anxiety. René is a technical manager at a textile factory and must face the anxiety caused by corporate downsizing. Janine is a self-educated actress/stylist who learns that the wife of her lover is dying and must decide to let them reunite. Jean is a controversial career-climbing writer/politician at a crossroads in life.
At Bertrand Morane's burial there are many of the women that the 40-year-old engineer loved. In flashback Bertrand's life and love affairs are told by himself while writing an autobiographical novel.
Emerging from a lengthy dinner where his mother was exhibited without restraint for the favor of a man, Daniel returns alone, sickened. Without imagining the trap closes on him, he later agrees to have a drink with a neighbor he just help carry packages. She "vamp" and keeps her house without a very fierce resistance opposes too happy to escape his solitude. Taking advantage of the absence of his mother, Daniel finally leaves the high school and moved to the neighbor who, having close to her more often, gets him a place in the clinic where she is employed.
Adapted from a story by William Irish, it's a noirish tale of a man who orders a mail-order bride but receives instead a con woman.
An ex-convict struggles to survive by brute force alone in a turn-of-the-century slum in Bucharest. Codine is the thug who served 10 years for murdering a friend. He returns home to his miserly mother, whose penny-pinching ways infuriate her son. A young boy looks up to Codine, and through the man's eyes he sees the economic and social injustices from an adult perspective. When Codine kills another man who violated his trust, his mother becomes more unhinged and paranoid. Thinking her son will steal her hoarded money, she plots to kill her only son. The impressionable child watches in horror and amazement at the cruel machinations of the adult work that surrounds him.
In a small town in southern France, on the seafront and not far from Italy, Dr. Valerio is working to heal the poor. His young wife, could no longer stand the place, encouraged him to go and settle in Nice but the doctor does not want to leave before having found a replacement. Valerio was particularly friendly with Sandro, an agricultural worker who maintains the trees belonging to Gorzone, wealthy industrialist and major employer in the city. Sandro, disturbed by the serious illness of his wife, is struggling to fulfill its functions. During an absence of his wife, Dr. Valerio meets Clara, a young Italian, and falls for her. The drama erupts when Gorzone dismisses Sandro ...
The title of this French noir drama translates to The Black File. Jean-Marc Bory plays Jacques Arnaud, an idealistic young investigator who comes to work in a small French town. He is soon involved in a mysterious case incriminating a town notable. Arnaud devotes himself to the case but the upshot of this is rather surprising to all concerned, not to mention the audience. Like Cayatte's previous efforts, Le Dossier Noir is based on the proposition that the phrase "French justice" can at times be oxymoronic.
