Follow in the footsteps of burlesque actor Pierre Richard, a key figure in French cinema in the 1970s and 1980s.
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.
Because he only thinks about Karine, the wife of his best friend André, Pierre, a writer, can no longer write. The situation is all the more complex as Pierre lives with André's first wife, Mireille, whom he took from her five years ago. He confuses his computer and Karine, and talks to her. Karine's spirit is with him. André and Mireille go to a congress of surgeons in Florida, Pierre and Karine, alone, spend delicious moments together.
Pierre Renard is the blackboy of the writer George Vallier. At the time of a reception, the Italian actor Aldo Barazutti takes him for the writer and proposes to him to come to work with him in Tunisia with the development of a scenario. In fact Barazutti wants only to flee her wife to find her mistress Valerie. Misunderstandings when Vallier joined them. They must flee in the desert a jealous husband...
Claude is in his last year of high-school, but he doesn't care much for school. Instead all his thoughts circle around girls and getting laid. But since he doesn't look very studly, he has a hard time realizing his fantasies. When he's finally got an invitation to a steamy afternoon by Carole, his father intercepts the letter...
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.
Pierre Gastié-Leroy is the son of a wealthy director of a factory of weapon manufacturing. Despite his parents, two generous uncles and a bishop godfather who try to inculcate him the rigid values of his social level, Pierre is a dreamer, antimilitaristic, social educator who dreams of saving three thugs, his "little guys" at the limit of delinquency. After several resounding failures that sent him to prison, Pierre is ordered by his father to join his factory to direct the social service. Tired of the venality of his father and the foolishness of the "little guys", Pierre hires them at the factory...
Unlucky in love, Alfred tries to commit suicide, only to be thwarted by police efforts to prevent a simultaneous attempt by a nearby young woman. Recovering, the young lady puts him up at her house, as he has run out of places to live. He joins a Parisian sporting team and seems to have transferred his bad luck to a corrupt television boss who is attempting to manipulate the game so that Alfred's Paris team loses.