Patrick Chesnais
The three "Unknown" are back in this movie where they wake up in a world where they really are unknown! They'll eventually find out that their career, films, sketches & songs do exist but from someone else!
The filmmaker sheds light on the history of the Red Star Football Club, founded by Jules Rimet in 1897, while several personalities share their experiences and testimonies.
Damien is a pawn in a primary school, and leads a quiet life. To rescue one of his young students, Bahzad, and his mother from imminent expulsion from the land, Damien reconnects with his parents' militant past and convinces his sister Mélanie, who has become a formidable business lawyer, her best friend Rudy and a bunch of unlikely pals to accompany him in his new fight. Together, they will break the law by solidarity. And very quickly to be completely exceeded.
A working woman, mother a three children, realizes that, when her youngest one is about to go to Canada to continue her education, she will end up out of her most precious goal, being a mother.
GO is not just an aging college teacher. He still is the young 18 year-old idealist who dared to engaged in social and political action to defend his principles. As a matter of fact, he was one of El Che’s last companions. It was somewhere over there, in Bolivia, in 1967. At least, that’s what he tells everyone...
Agathe Langlois, Parisian until the end of the nails well varnishes, is delighted: she is going to be confirmed as a professor of English. The happiness of the good news will not last as she learns that she is deployed to the countryside.
Paris, France, early 19th century. The legendary convict François Vidocq lives in disguise trying to escape from a tragic past that torments him. When, after an unfortunate event, he crosses paths with the police chief, he makes a bold decision that will turn the ruthless mastermind of the Parisian underworld against him.
Lauren, a lovely 29-year-old it-girl, tries to break into the world of fashion by skimming Parisian parties. Olivia, a 28-year-old psychologist, has two obsessions: to save the confectionery of her parents, and to find her ideal husband. At the age of 26, Salma, a fiery young history teacher, still lives with her mother in the suburbs. Their roads have no reason to cross - until the day when, on the death of their biological father that they never knew, they inherit together a splendid Parisian apartment. For these three sisters who have nothing in common, cohabitation will prove to be explosive, to say the least.
If Paris is the city of lovers, it is also that ... ex! Antoine does not dare to commit, Didier regrets his ex-wife, Father Laurent must celebrate the marriage of his ex, Julie, Serge is harassed by Lise, the ex of his girlfriend of the moment, while Greg consoles With the dog ... of his ex! So many characters whose lives will be telescoped in a joyful disorder and who could fall back in love! But of whom? Whether they obsessed us or loved to hate them, deep down, it is difficult to forget their ex!
After attempting to set a mailbox on fire, Pimpette, 14, and her elder sister, Joséphine, 18, spend their summer holidays shuttling between their secretly pregnant mom and bachelor father. But when Joséphine gets involved with the wrong crowd, little Pimpette turns out to be more responsible than the grown-ups who spend their time educating her.
An unusually cold winter forces the french government to push the best housed people to accommodate some poor fellow citizens. The decree called "Le Grand Partage" creates some trouble among the residents of a Paris upscale apartment block.
The head of a famous artist with a sordid past is found in the catacombs in Paris. In his studio, Commissaire Rousseau and the young profiler Mariella De Luca discover a second decapitated body, his wife's. The mystery deepens when another head is found a few days later.
When the little haberdasher Arras discovers she's won 18 million in the lottery and can now afford anything she wants, she has only one fear: losing the small joys of life made simple it cherishes above all. But fate is obstinate, and this is giving too long this good fortune will trigger it, despite herself, a hurricane that will change everything. Everything except her.
Driss, carefree, smug and naive, lives off petty theft and minor racketeering. Until he meets Danny, an old crook who takes him under his wing and shows him the ropes. Through knowing him, young Driss will gradually lose his innocence.
Bright days ahead? Caroline has retired, at last. A new life lies before her: time to take care of her children, her husband, and, most of all, herself. However, she soon comes to realize that this new freedom is synonymous with boredom and idleness. Especially when she receives a membership to her neighborhood’s senior club as a birthday present… Reluctant at first, she nevertheless decides to take the plunge. Oddly enough, she meets great people there, starting with the young computer science teacher, who is far from insensitive to her charms. Caroline gradually takes control of her life again and lives a second youth: taking a new lover, living new experiences, breaking the rules, not doing what’s expected of her… Who said that retirement was the beginning of the end and not a new beginning?
Charles and Pierrot are inseparable. When Charles takes early retirement, it seems the world is their oyster. They can spend even more time together. Their motto is simple: "Make the most of life and have fun!». They fill their days with abundant imagination, under the tender and sometimes worried gaze of the women in their lives…
Despite his fame, Taillandier has suddenly stopped painting. Deeply depressed, the sixty-year-old decides to go away. He has no clear goal and explains nothing to his close friends. During his travels, he has a strange encounter with Marylou, a wild teenager who was rejected by her mother. The lost girl and the man at the end of his tether will travel together awhile. Finally living like a father and daughter, at peace.
Paul de Marseul, a prestigious wine-maker and owner of a renowned chateau and vineyard in Saint-Emilion, is disheartened by the notion of his son Martin taking over the family business. Martin does not seem to have inherited the qualities that Paul esteems in a wine-maker: persistence, creative insight and technical prowess matched with passion for the job and the product, and Paul frequently reminds him of this, whether explicitly or in subtle gestures. When Philippe, the son of his manager, appears at the vineyard, Paul leaps at the chance to name him as his successor, neglecting the wishes of his own son...
A group of adventurers make off with 600 kilograms of gold in Guyana, but when their helicopter crashes in the jungle, gold fever takes over.
Romantic drama in which a young woman must learn to live with her past in order to finally move forward.
Mady Celliers, an attractive housewife of 60, he spends his life speaking ill of her two daughters and her husband, a man who shows a strange behavior since has retired. Antoine, the eldest son, company director, is unable to make a success of a business: out of a bankruptcy to get into another, her sister Alice madonnas obsessively paints sad. Annabelle, a nurse in an intensive care unit, tries desperately to save his family pronosticándole the future. When Alice meets by chance Jacques, a lonely police pessimistic explode all family neurosis.
So called friends at a dinner party end up acting like a dysfunctional family.
Mayor Dellas accidentally kills his mistress and Inspector Alexander Konygnski is determined to uncover the truth. Seeking re-election, Dellas fells threatened by this renewed attention, and is driven to extreme lengths to protect his career and reputation. A gripping game of cat and mouse.
Dans les années 70 Bruno Caprice a connu un succès éphémère avec "Quand tu t'en vas", son premier et unique 45 tours. Aujourd'hui oublié, il gagne sa vie comme réceptionniste dans un grand hôtel parisien. Mais un coup de fil inattendu va changer le cours de sa vie...
Not long before World War I, in a French Alpine town near the Italian border, a pack of slaughtered wolves is delivered to local taxidermist Leon (Patrick Chesnais). A surviving black cub comes down from the mountains looking for his family, and is saved from discovery and certain death by Leon’s young daughter Angele, who releases him back into the wild. The Great War comes and goes, making local foundry owners the Garcins rich. Family patriarch Albert Garcin (Michel Galabru), who happens to be Angele’s godfather, has given a free lifetime’s lease of a shack in the hills to a gypsy woman (played in flashbacks by Elisa Tovati in which she’s seen, literally, having dances with wolves on stage). Her son Guiseppe (Stefano Accorsi), who appears to be slightly mentally handicapped, guards the wolves he’s befriended up there, especially the black pack leader he calls Carbone.
A family’s secret, it’s a time bomb ! Despite their fundamentally opposite characters, Albert and Gédéon, former participants of the May 1968 protest movement, share the same house since the disappearance of the woman of Albert. When Claire, the Albert’s daughter, come back to home, secrets of their past « Flower Power » reappear …
The true story of Elle France editor Jean-Dominique Bauby, who, in 1995 at the age of 43, suffered a stroke that paralyzed his entire body, except his left eye. Using that eye to blink out his memoir, Bauby eloquently described the aspects of his interior world, from the psychological torment of being trapped inside his body to his imagined stories from lands he'd only visited in his mind.
Jean-Pierre, a wealthy businessman, is lonely. He still desires his wife but she only seems interested in shopping and the beauty salon. Tired of lunching alone every day, one day he decides to invite his chauffeur to join him, and a relationship quickly develops as the two find they have much in common. Are they just cash machines for their wives? Don't they deserve some love (i.e. sex) in return? Jean-Pierre confiscates his wife's credit card, but things don't turn out exactly the way he'd hoped...
Pierre Forêt est drôle et c'est son drame. C'est aussi son métier ; il est chauffeur de salle à la télé. Pierre Forêt est drôle mais il aurait préféré être beau. Ou alors comédien. Ou chanteur. Question de crédibilité. Pierre Forêt n'en peut plus. Ça fait six nuits qu'il ne dort plus. Il a enlevé Clovis Costa, le chanteur, l'idole, et le séquestre dans l'appartement de son enfance. Aucune issue.
Le Grand Charles was a 2006 French TV-drama on the life of Charles de Gaulle from 1939 to 1959, written and directed by Bernard Stora. De Gaulle was played by Bernard Farcy, Winston Churchill by David Ryall, and Franklin D. Roosevelt by Robert Hardy. Other actors in the cast included Dominic Gould, Sam Spiegel and Jay Benedict.
Laurent loves Camille but he can’t bring himself to marry her. Then he meets Elodie and discovers what love really is – not the mild cozy affection he has for Camille but a cataclysmic, thunderous all-consuming earthquake of the soul. The only problem is that Elodie is the girlfriend of Laurent’s best friend, François...
Jean-Claude Delsart, a 50 years-old bailiff, with his worn-out smile and heart, abandoned a long time ago the idea that life could give him pleasures. Until the day, he dares to push the doors of a tango lesson...
The 20-year-old Juliette tries to come to terms with an unexpected pregnancy, despite a lack of support from the father of the child and from her mother.
Directed by Rémi Waterhouse, Mille Millièmes is centered around an eccentric ensemble of apartment residents. Kindness is noticeably absent among their quarters, as demonstrated by a dating pair of neighbors whose request to have their apartments connected was flatly denied. To make matters worse, beggars gathering at a charity event are cruelly tormented by various tenants during the Christmas season. Last but not least is the Portuguese concierge whose services are in danger of being replaced by a more cost-effective alternative, and a widow whose recent loss earns her no sympathy from the rent-demanding landlords.
Ideally, a love story should last for life… But this is often not the case. Does this indicate that men and women are meant to fall in love several times over? Why do people tire of each other? What events lead to a break-up? If they could be identified, could we then eradicate them? Four stories delve, by way of personal accounts and illustration, into relationships that went astray before they should have. Men and women of different ages and social conditions recount their stories. Four couples, four break-ups, four attempts at an explanation – combined with the ambitious aim to amuse!
Comedy drama about an apathetic writer whose only interest is in his psychiatrist's watch which may have belonged to John F. Kennedy at the time of his assassination in 1963.
True tale of the tumultuous love affair between two French literary icons of the 19th Century, novelist George Sand and poet Alfred de Musset. But their affair falls apart during an excursion to Venice, Italy where Musset is distracted by drugs and Sand by a handsome doctor.
After her gynecologist tells her that her current involuntary celibacy could result in her being unable to enjoy sex in the future, Eva begins to consider ways that she could take active steps to get some action going in that area. Unfortunately, none of the men she currently knows are interested in going to bed with her, including her business partner, who just might be sexually attracted to trees but certainly isn't to her. That being the case, it is particularly galling that he gets jealous at the very notion of her having sex with business clients. Eva discusses these issues (and a great deal more) with her similarly forty-ish gal-pals.
A film with emphasis on visuals and music, the plot concerns characters who meet in present time, mainly the male gypsy Jesus, and the female thief and con-artist Odona, who share parallel experiences from lives 2000 years in the past. These stories are juxtaposed.
To a non-French speaker, the word La Pagaille looks charming, elegant, even tidy. However, it means "a mess," and a mess is just what the happily divorced Martin gets into when he and his ex-wife Brigitte, the mother of his children, rekindle their long-dormant relationship and announce that they intend to move back in together. Not only do the children find this whole thing confusing, but the husband's and the wife's lovers are equally befuddled. Add to that the need for Martin to meet Brigitte's lover and vice-versa, and you have the beginnings of a mess. When it begins to seem to Brigitte's former lover that he has offended the Muslims with a book he translated and he is slated for death, the whole thing grows yet more complicated. In this comedy, this list only scratches the surface of the messes these people must confront.
Last days of queen Marie Antoinette stunningly portrayed by a director who's clearly done a massive historical research. An accurate plot and a very moving rendering.
How can moon and time affect human mood and fate? In the manner of a Greek tragedy , this movie shows how the chaos of life ineluctably propels its characters towards violence and alienation.
The first film shot by legendary cinematographer Darius Khondji and anchored by a heartbreaking performance by Sophie Rochut, EMBRASSE-MOI is a slice-of-life drama about Louise, an 12-year-old girl left to her own devices over the summer following her parents’ divorce. Her mother is a renowned concert pianist, anxious to begin a second life free of entanglements. Her father is a workaholic industrialist, distracted to the point of denial about the collapse of his marriage. Rosier’s command of her cast is impossible to deny, as is the brave unsentimentality of EMBRASSE-MOI’s approach: Louise clocks her mother’s newer, younger lover in one brazen panning shot across his naked body. While Rosier denied any autobiographical interpretations of EMBRASSE-MOI, it’s hard not to read at least a kinship between Louie’s solitude and the filmmaker’s own relationship with her famous mother Hélène Gordon-Lazareff (founder of Elle) and stepfather Pierre Lazareff, who adopted Michèle as his own.
Constance is a young lady who likes to read – and who likes to dream while reading - to imagine, to create images. This is what she does for «La Lectrice», a novel which tells the adventures of Marie, a young lady who likes reading so much that she decides to make a profession of it. Selected texts, Provence in wintertime, different neighbourhoods. Deviations from fiction, secret itinaries. An imaginary space penetrates the space of the town, whose streets Marie stries along, while Constance devours novel. The unknown lies behind each word.
A little town in the north of France, 1941. Blanche has three children. She worries about her husband Victor, who often goes out at night. Actually, Victor belongs to the Resistance. Soon, Blanche will be a resistant too. In the network, there is also Germinal, the hairdresser. His daughter Marie knows everything and asks to be part of it... Chronicle of the occupation and of the resistance through the eyes of the women.
This drama about a barmaid caught up in events beyond her control is the first film directed by Juliet Berto, and was also based on her own concept for the story. The barmaid, played by Berto, has been trying to take care of Bobby, a teenage drug pusher who is in over his head. Before she can put him back on track and get him out of the drug underworld, the young man is killed while being chased by a narcotics agent. Depressed by his death but not derailed, she finds herself trying to help out a gay user who depended on Bobby for his supply of drugs. She decides to procure some drugs for the desperate addict, and is trapped in the bathroom of a bar - with the drugs - when narcotics agents burst upon the scene. Her boyfriend rushes to help her but is killed by an agent who shoots first and thinks later. The barmaid does not face a very optimistic future as the narc arrests her - but releases a parish minister who had been helping her find a source for the drugs.
The life of workers and their families in a construction site of a highway in 1965.
"Cocktail Molotov" is the story of the adventures of this threesome, who reach Venice only to learn of the outbreak of the May 1968 disturbances at home. Once again, Anne, Frederic and Bruno realize that the important things of their time are happening somewhere where they are not. Swindled out of their car and virtually broke, they hitchhike back to Paris, hoping to arrive in time for some of the excitement.
Rien ne va plus is a series of comedy sketches of disparate quality, on the social, cultural, and political foibles that make the French, French. Various settings and character types are given a once-over, including pseudo-intellectuals, punk bikers, right-wingers, and patrons of a low-end cafe.
French diplomat Dominique Auphal is put under surveillance by an unnamed secret service. They wish to find a weakness in his life in order to control him politically. Auphal becomes "File no. 51": his private life is spied, analysed and commented.
Jean-Arthur has been working as a clerk in a travel agency. One day, he, along with his colleague comes to a brilliant idea: what if I offer tourists real extreme recreation? So the group of tourists land on a deserted island with no food, no shelter, nothing.
In this poetic slice-of-life film that reveals the problems and needs of a group of lowlife characters, unwed mother Vivaine (Dominique Labourier) falls in love with working-class youth Francois (Patrick Chesnais) who has a shady past. Albert (Philippe Noiret), a no-good insurance con-artist, poses for many years as Francois' friend, but tragedy ensues when Albert comes between the lovers, and Francois and Albert resort to physical violence to settle their differences.
