On an otherwise normal day, Étienne, a happily married man and a good father, sees something that stops him dead in his tracks: a gorgeous woman in a billowing red dress. Long after she has left his vision, her memory continues to haunt his mind. He falls instantly in love with her and tries everything to get to know her better. Helping Étienne snare his elusive lady in red are his three bumbling buddies, which all have secret affairs and/or cheat on their wives.
The film covers a hundred years in the lives of the Ricordi family, the Milan publishing house of the title, and the various composers and other historic personalities, whose careers intersected with the growth of the Ricordi house. It beautifully draws the parallel between the great music of the composers, the historic and social upheavals of their times, as well as the "smaller stories" of the successive generations of Ricordi.
In 19th century France, Jean Valjean, a man imprisoned for stealing bread, must flee a relentless policeman named Javert. The pursuit consumes both men's lives, and soon Valjean finds himself in the midst of the student revolutions in France.
In a moment of madness a middle-aged, married and respectable pharmacist kills a young woman who is sun-bathing by a lake. Unable to take in what he has done, he flees from the scene of the crime and behaves as if nothing has happened. Eventually her boyfriend is charged with the crime and, in a strange twist of fate, the killer finds himself serving on the jury.
Having fortuitously discovered a photograph in which Marthe embraces someone unknown, Étienne Dorsay becomes jealous and imagines various stratagems to identify the lover. In the meantime, he and his friends acquire a weekend house for a very low price.
Nine episodes about life in Italy in the period just before its economic boom.
A provincial ingenue leaves her mother’s tobacco shop with dreams of a life in the Parisian theater, only to become entangled in relationships with a lecherous aristocrat, his starry-eyed nephew, and an old ham actor.
Stage actress Marianne has decided to give up her career to marry wealthy nobleman Marquis Antoine de Fontaines. As a wedding present, Antoine gives his future wife a precious diamond necklace, which is coveted by a gang of crooks. Jean, one of them, is given the mission to approach Marianne and steal the necklace from her. The only trouble is that when he meets her, she recognizes him as the man she once loved.
A young, talented and ambitious journalist, Louis heads off to try his luck in Paris. He's spotted by Walter, editor-in-chief for a major daily newspaper, who takes to him and furthers his career. What he doesn't realise is that Louis is ready to betray anyone to achieve his ends...
Mathieu Grégoire is an esteemed author who lives in Spa with his wife and daughter and leads a carefully structured life. One day, while out in the desolate landscape of the High Fens he meets a mysterious woman whom he calls 'Belle'. An obsessive passion is kindled in Mathieu and in a short space of time he loses all control over his existence.
A subtitle warns, "beware of dark sunglasses." Anna and her lover, whose looks in bowler and bow tie are reminiscent of a young Buster Keaton, kiss chastely on a bridge overlooking the Seine. He dons sunglasses and waves as she runs down a stairway to the river's edge, then watches in horror as she's knocked flat and loaded into the back of a hearse. In vain, he gives chase. Disconsolate, he buys a large funeral wreath and a handkerchief from sympathetic vendors. He removes the glasses to wipe his eyes and realizes they are the cause of all his woe. He replays the farewell without the glasses.
On the very day of his wedding, Valentin Le Barroyer sees the one he was to marry fly away. Hélène has always loved her cousin André, to the great displeasure of her aunt who had combined the failed marriage. The two lovers take refuge in the Dordogne at the home of Hélène's grandmother who believes them to be really husband and wife. Valentin finds the young couple too late, he only has to console himself with a friend of Hélène's.
Pierre Laurent, a former doctor, has established himself as a renowned healer in Brittany. A young girl, Isabelle, who follows his results with admiration, declares her love for him and becomes engaged. The reactions of his former colleagues bring Pierre before the courts. A misunderstanding with Isabelle thwarts the wedding plans. Later, the young girl, suffering from a brain tumor, allows herself to be cured by the healer. Pierre does not cure her, but leads her to her death without suffering.
At the beginning of the 20th century, the destiny of Félicie Nanteuil, a young girl from the provinces who became a big star on the stage thanks to a comedian who committed suicide out of love for her.
France under Louis XIII. 1615. The Duke of Angoulême is at the head of a group of gentlemen who are conspiring to drive the Florentines out of court, of whom Concini is the all-powerful leader. A cadet from Gascony, Adhémar de Capestang, who was later to become the Capitan, left his native province to come and try his luck in Paris. Along the way, he saves a young girl, Gisèle d'Angoulême, from a masked individual who wanted to kidnap her.
During the Second World War, in occupied Paris, a group of high school students is more active at selling cigarettes and silk stockings than at studying. But the day a new philosophy teacher takes charge of their class, things begin to change. It must be said that Mademoiselle Bravard is not only a gifted educator but a charming young woman as well. Thanks to her, all the students end up passing their finals.
In the heart of Paris, a restaurateur's mundane life is disrupted by the arrival of his ex-wife's daughter, who claims to be in need after her mother's death. After marrying her, tensions rise when she becomes involved with a young student, leading to betrayal and murder. As secrets unfold, he uncovers the truth about her past and her manipulative nature.
A society heiress and a resistance fighter are tragically killed at the same moment and meet in the afterlife. They are offered a second chance at life if they can prove their love is real or be doomed to roam the earth as ghosts.
Kohlman, the attorney for the Fournil bank, diverts money from the institution. To hide his malpractices, he imagines to remove the director, the young and overconfident Clement Fournil, during a cruise at sea on the yacht Emile Frechisse.
Robert Bobin has been an assistant accountant for twenty years now and, although meek and obedient, is getting weary of his monotonous, limited life. He tries marriage but, unfortunately, Blanche, the nurse he marries, proves to be a shrew. One day, a miracle happens : Michèle, a young orphan and fellow-worker gradually develops tender feelings for him. But will Robert be able to overcome his mediocrity and grasp this unexpected opportunity to find happiness?
Suppose lost and found objects could talk... But they can! At least four of them... : -A statuette of Osiris remembers how two ex-lovers, a model and a good for nothing who claimed to be an Egyptologist, met again one Christmas Eve. -A violin has things to say about Raoul, a humble policeman who lost Solange, a widowed grocer he loved, to a god-dam seducing busker also named Raoul. -A scarf was witness to an eerie romance between a young madman and girl he had saved from suicide. -A funeral wreath lets us know how it caused a young woman to believe her lover dead. After having told their respective story, the objects return to their customary stillness.
Madame Célerier is determined to marry off her son François to a rich and haughty woman but François has other plans.
In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.
"Olivia" captures the awakening passions of an English adolescent sent away for a year to a small finishing school outside Paris. The innocent but watchful Olivia develops an infatuation for her headmistress Julie and through this screen of love observes the tense romance between Julie and the other head of the school Cara in its final months.
This documentary brings a lighting on the originality and the specificity of the actor-author Pierre Richard, improbable synthesis of the talking ant silent films, heir to Buster Keaton for the gestural one and the expression of the body, and to Groucho Marx for the puns and the burlesque verbal one. Conceived like a voyage inside the universe of Pierre Richard, "the Art of unsteadiness" makes it possible to better understand its step, its method of actor, director and gag man. With through many testimonies, extracts of films and archives documents, drawn up here the portrait of one of the large last burlesques.
Gilberte is a sixteen year old girl raised by her aunt and grandmother to be a demimondaine. But she's not ready for that yet, and spends her days in lessons and in teasing Mamita's old friend, the rich playboy Gaston LaChaille, and following his affairs from afar. But when Gaston throws off his latest mistress, it looks as if Gigi just might be ready to begin her destined career.
During the First World War, the Empyrée Montmartre, a Paris music-hall, is dedicated to patriotic revues whose star is the charming Mitsou. The young artist is not without talent but she is mainly well-connected. She is indeed the cherished mistress of Pierre Duroy-Lelong, a rich industrialist. One night, thanks to Petite-Chose, an ebullient singer-dancer and her co-star, she gets to know a handsome army, Lieutenant Bleu. Mitsou falls madly in love with him and Lieutenant Bleu is physically attracted to her. The trouble is that Bleu comes from a distinguished family and cannot put up with her lack of culture and artistic bad taste...
The scene is a tawdry hotel room in Limbo, where several damned souls are gathered. At first, the group fails to comprehend where they are or why they're there. When the horrible truth dawns upon them, they carp and snipe at one another, blaming everyone but themselves for their dismal fate.
Abandoned documentary on the country Brazil which director Clouzot wanted to make while on honeymoon with his wife Véra Clouzot whose of Brazilian origin. Only an introductionary section set in Paris was ever filmed.
A writer in her fifties spends the summer in her Saint-Tropez home, tending to her garden and animals while reflecting on her past. As nature thrives around her, a handsome young man and a restless woman draw near, bringing the uncertainties of desire and romance. Adapted from Colette's quasi-autobiographical novel.
When Denis returns from Cambodia, his mother tells him that his father has disappeared, apparently a runaway. But the mystery reigns around this case. Denis decides to see Eva again, the woman who encouraged him to leave France, but the young woman also disappears. Little by little, he finds himself trapped by the mystery of her disappearances.
This film is an adaptation of Jean Amila's novel Le Boucher des Hurlus. The story, set in the aftermath of the war, is about Michel, a young man orphaned in this manner. He lives with his mother until she collapses under the wave of vituperation from the women in her community, who consider her murdered husband to have been a traitor. When he is sent to an orphanage, he discovers that many of the children in it are there for the same reason he is. Michel decides to escape his captivity and kill the general who ordered his father's death. He and the other children like him are able to get away from the orphanage, in the course of their journeys, they tour the grim battlefields of the recent war. Together, they return to Paris, determined to exact their revenge.
A thief known as Simon the Swiss faces up and downs in his criminal profession.
A woman in Paris hires a taxi driver to locate her ex-lover, father to her newborn child, who left her without leaving an address.
A short documentary on the chateaux of the Loire in France was commissioned by the French Tourist Bureau.
François Naulet turns his bedroom into an island of drugs, loneliness and despair.
In the 1950s, in a small provincial town, a young inexperienced judge clashes with an influential notable during an investigation into a suspicious death. His perseverance to get to the truth will cause a huge scandal.
He's twenty-five. She's thirty-five. He is a young agricultural engineer. She runs a nightclub in Cahors. He's a runner and a pretty boy. She's beautiful and unscrupulous. They like each other. People gossip about them. He persists. She leaves, afraid to see such a beautiful love deteriorate. She returns. He wants to marry her. She tells him it's no longer possible. Out of spite, he throws stones into the bushes. And then, after all, he comes to his senses.
A brave bookseller raises his four daughters alone, all of whom he employs in his shop. They are especially interested in their sentimental stories. Rosine, the youngest, falls in love with Francis, fiancé of Edith, the eldest. But Francis pushes her away and Rosine announces that she is going to commit suicide. Bertrand, a young doctor, decides to stop her by watching over her. After a few adventures, everything finally works out. Edith keeps her fiancé, the father, from whom the adventure has been hidden, returns to the usual course of his life and Bertrand and Rosine find themselves alone.
Professor Charles Buisson, astronomer and Nobel Prize winner, has just discovered a nova. He informs the other observatories by telephone. Just as he thinks one of them is calling back, he finds himself on the line with a young woman threatening suicide at the Ruban Bleu cabaret, if her lover hasn't joined her by midnight. Intrigued, the professor decides to go and prevent the unfortunate woman from committing suicide. One of his students, who earns her living as an understudy in a knife act, helps him in his investigation, while the school principal and a policeman suspect him of being a prankster or even of selling drugs. For the scientist, it's an opportunity to discover a world of music-hall that he'd never known before: "I thought I knew the sky chart by heart, but there's one planet that was totally unknown to me: Earth. I'll be back!
Minne is a very imaginative young lady. She pretends to have had lovers and can't think of anything better to do other than... to tell Antoine, her husband, the day she marries him. Bad beginning for the couple... As the marriage is not consummated for years, Minne feels frustrated and tries to find elsewhere the carnal knowledge she does not find at home. But Antoine is a kind-hearted man and on the occasion of a trip, a sexual balance is at last found between the two partners.
Witty narration follows the history of Versailles Palace; founded by Louis XIII, enlarged by autocratic Louis XIV, whose personal affairs and amours, and those of his two successors, are followed in more detail to the start of the Revolution, after which the story is brought rapidly up to date. A huge cast plays mainly historical persons who appear briefly.
Alice Rémon, a pharmacist, is a prostitute who managed to leave the streets by getting married. Her husband dies one day, poisoned. Her mother-in-law, who hates her, accuses her of murder.
Ireland, 1922. In the midst of a national uprising, Catherine, a young orphan employed in household chores, goes in search of her brother whom she has heard in a dream calling for help.
A young Vietnamese boy's life is thrown into turmoil by the war raging in his country. The ten year old remains with his mother and baby sister as his father goes off to fight for the Viet Cong. During his father's absence, his mother dies from overwork and the inability to find proper medical care for her illness. He cares for his baby sister and struggles to earn a living by shining shoes and doing other odd jobs before his father returns. Both an American soldier and a Viet Cong regular are shown defending their country's political agenda. Also shown are guerilla tactics and bombings in this feature directed by veteran combat photographer Raoul Coutard.
Pushed by her husband to settle in the family castle, Agnès finds her sister-in-law Alix there. Her husband Carlos, often absent, loses interest in his wife and gradually approaches Agnès who will end up giving up this relationship.
David, a Jewish filmmaker in his thirties, is working on a screenplay with autobiographical overtones. His girlfriend, Anna, with whom he lives, finds his story very narcissistic.
A psychopathic industrial spy terrorizes a secretary late at night in a darkened high-rise office building.
Micheline, who fled to Paris with the man she is in love with, finds herself on her own when he abandons her. She lands in a reformatory from which she manages to escape.
Given up for dead three years ago in a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest, a young woman arrives in Paris to find her eminent ethnologist husband. She learns of his death in obscure circumstances, having remarried in the meantime. She sets out to unravel the mystery surrounding her husband's death.
Agnès Varda eloquently captures Paris in the sixties with this real-time portrait of a singer set adrift in the city as she awaits test results of a biopsy. A chronicle of the minutes of one woman’s life, Cléo from 5 to 7 is a spirited mix of vivid vérité and melodrama, featuring a score by Michel Legrand and cameos by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina.
In a small French village, everything would be quiet if the local wildlife cop was not being ridiculed by a smart poacher.
A drifting woman hangs out in the suburbs of Marseille. A young engineer picks her up drunk and takes her to the hospital. He does not know then that it is the Countess Armance de Lunegarde, driven from her home and performing as a gummy in third-rate music halls.