In 1960s France, 16-year-old Hannah Goldman is experiencing a painful adolescence. Her Jewish background and plain appearance make her an object of ridicule, but she has a talent for music and is determined to fulfil her ambition to play in the school jazz band.
A large family crams into a three-room flat in a drab suburb.Twelve people ,soon joined,out of the blue, by the prodigal son, released from jail.To make matters worse,the TV set , then the sofa and finally the refrigerator vanish into thin air.Neverthelesss, life goes on ,with mom's nervous breakdowns , dad's absences ;The daughter, Julie, an abandoned social worker,is always sobbing ; her sister , rehearsing the "Hebrew slaves chorus" is eagerly waiting for her drafted fiancee.
A philosophizing uninvited hitchhiker terrorizes a writer, who's selling dictionaries while he's struggling with writer's block.
When a neo-Nazi group of terrorists is set to blow a pop concert off the face of the earth because it is an anti-racist benefit, they are faced with the intrepid Jean-Pierre Mougin, a macho sports reporter with zero tolerance for Nazi hate crimes. Going along with Mougin to stop the bombing is Lyza, whose brother was killed by this group of fascists, and so she is ardently seeking revenge. After Mougin gets his hands on a videotape that reveals the plot to blow up the concert and its audience, he and Lyza join forces. As the fuse gets shorter and shorter, Mougin is also joined by sympathetic street gangs. Thus reinforced, he faces his opposition (including crooked cops) in increasingly more desperate attempts to stop Murmeau, the leader of the Nazi gang, from carrying out his terrorist objective.
In a desolate Paris suburb, no one dares challenge crime boss Hagen, who rules his turf with an iron fist. That includes his former friend Chet, who vows to keep to himself in order to protect his loved ones. But Hagen keeps pushing his buttons… and Chet can only stand for so much before he explodes.
An unemployed investor creates a fictious business partner to attempt to improve business. Eventually, his creation gets out of control as his business becomes successful and his wife announces that she is in love with the partner and his son wishes the partner was his father -- although no one has ever seen him. To regain control, the man decides to "kill" his imaginary partner and is arrested for the murder.
François Perrin is a journalist who reads the news on RTL radio. Alone in life, his only "amusement" is his neighbor from Africa, who makes mildly fun of him from time to time. One evening, François is bored, and decides to call a random telephone number. He gets Christine on the line, a bit of an old school pharmacist, who hesitates to put down the phone, and plays the game of seduction with the charming "Mr X"...
When Charles Le Braque learns that his boss' 17 years old daughter is pregnant, he fears that his 16 years old nice Joel from France, who's spending her vacation with them in Canada, might fall into the same trap. So he and his wife decide to give her the lecture of plants and bees... but it turns out that she's already well informed, gives them a lecture about simultaneous orgasms. She inspires the sexually repressed couple to start experimenting with "modern" forms of sex.
The movie follows the lives of a woman and a man starting from several generations earlier. The story spans a whole century and several continents.
He is a sales rep. She is a secretary. They live in the suburbs but she works in Paris. They don't see much of each other and spend much of their time in commuter trains. They try desperately to change job locations to be more often together, but... The plot is not the important thing in the film ; what makes it emblematic of the early and mid-seventies is the insouciant atmosphere. The '74 oil crisis had not yet morphed into a recession, and life was good - even though it was as hard as ever to find a home near one's workplace (or the reverse) ! Marthe Keller and Jacques Higelin are both excellent. The movie is not an all-time great, but it captures the "zeitgeist" of French life in the Seventies.
The sleepy little village of Loubressac is well on its way to becoming a ghost town. To save the town, the local citizenry hatch a plan to attract tourists. To their horror, the plan misfires when a group of hippies are the first to move in. The hippies' free and unconventional ways quickly upset the staid lives of the locals. Then one of the locals is found murdered, and suspicion inevitably falls on the newcomers. Eventually, the locals and the hippies join forces to solve the mystery, and in the course of their adventures learn to respect each others' ways.