Jean Rochefort
Two men, fortyish, worn out by their wives, abandon everything to go and live in the back of beyond. There they meet a truculent priest, a boozer, Émile who recalls them to life’s simple pleasures. Calm is what they want. But soon their example inspires thousands of disorientated males, fleeing the feminist 1970s. Soon, too, there arrives a squadron of nymphomaniac Amazons.
To get royal backing on a needed drainage project, a poor French lord must learn to play the delicate games of wit at court at Versailles.
The story of a famous old sculptor, weary of life and the folly of men, who finds, thanks to the arrival of a Spanish girl escaped from a refugee camp, the desire to return to work and sculpt your final work in occupied France in 1943. Model and artist, as they work, speak with simplicity and closeness to everything around them: The life and death, the injustice of the war, youth and old age, the search for beauty in times of horror, the sense and the need for art …
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?
France asleep in the nineteenth century, governed by steam and Napoleon VI, where scientists vanish mysteriously, a girl, Avril, goes in search of her missing scientist parents.
In Scotland 1874, Jack is born on the coldest day ever. Because of the extreme cold, his heart stops beating. The responsible midwife in Edinburgh finds a way to save him by replacing his heart with a clock. So he lives and remains under the midwife’s protective care. But he must not get angry or excited because that endangers his life by causing his clock to stop working. Worse than that, when he grows up, he has to face the fact he cannot fall in love because that too could stop his delicate heart.
Mr. Bean wins a trip to Cannes where he unwittingly separates a young boy from his father and must help the two reunite. On the way he discovers France, bicycling and true love, among other things.
A man receives a mysterious e-mail appearing to be from his wife, who was murdered years earlier. As he frantically tries to find out whether she’s alive, he finds himself being implicated in her death.