Melvil Poupaud
What do you dream of when you’re 16-years-old and in a seaside resort in Normandy in the 1980s? A best friend? A lifelong teen pact? Scooting off on adventures on a boat or a motorbike? Living life at breakneck speed? No. You dream of death. Because you can’t get a bigger kick than dying. And that’s why you save it till the very end. The summer holidays are just beginning, and this story recounts how Alexis grew into himself.
In September 1938 a British detective comes to a small French coastal town in order to investigate the death of a colleague. Prime suspects are the members of English aristocratic family with plenty of skeletons in the closet. This is a loose adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel Towards Zero.
Nora Wilder (Parker Posey), a single, career woman works at a Manhattan boutique hotel where her excellent skills in guest relations lack in the romantic department. If it is not her loving and dominant mother (Gena Rowlands) attempting to set her up that consistently fail, she has her friend’s (Drea de Matteo) disastrous blind dates to rely on as a backup for further dismay. She’s surrounded by friends who are all happily engaged or romantically involved and somehow, love escapes Nora — until she meets an unusual Frenchman (Melvil Poupaud) who helps her discover life beyond her self-imposed boundaries.
Victoria Spick, a criminal lawyer who is single, turns up at a wedding and meets three men there: David, the father of her daughters; Vincent, a friend of hers; and Sam, a former drug dealer who she bailed out. The next day, Vincent is accused of attempted murder by his partner.
Alice is a sailor. While her partner Félix waits for her on land, she sets off as second mechanic on the Fidelio, an old freighter. On board, she discovers not only that her predecessor has just died, but also that the skipper is none other than the first great love of her life. Alice finds a notebook in her cabin, apparently that of the former mechanic, and on reading its contents – accounts of mechanical problems, sexual conquests and lovelorn emotions – finds, oddly, that they mirror her own concerns. As they make stops at various ports, dealing with life aboard alongside an all-male crew and the swell and pitch of her romantic feelings, the young woman tries to stay on course.
Romain, 31, a photographer, learns that a malignancy may kill him within a few months. Decisions: treatment? work? how to tell his lover and his family. He remembers the sea and himself as a child. He stares in the mirror. He’s cruel: facing death, he pushes people away – what’s the point? He visits his grandmother to tell her; on the way, he chats briefly with a waitress. He looks at old photos, visits a childhood tree house. He takes pictures. Returning from his grandmother’s, he stops for food and sees the waitress, Jany, again. She makes a request. He returns to an empty flat – his lover has left. Can Jany’s proposition give him a way to move past self-pity?
Set in France during the mid-1970s, Vanessa, a former dancer, and her husband Roland, an American writer, travel the country together. They seem to be growing apart, but when they linger in one quiet, seaside town they begin to draw close to some of its more vibrant inhabitants, such as a local bar/café-keeper and a hotel owner.
Provocative, outrageously profane and surprisingly tender amidst an explosion of unbridled testosterone, 44 INCH CHEST explores the masculine ego at breaking point, testing whether fear is stronger than love. Colin (Ray Winstone) is in agony, shattered by his wife’s (Joanne Whalley) infidelity, so his friends kidnap the wife’s lover so he can have his revenge.
When their regal matriarch falls ill, the troubled Vuillard family come together for a hesitant Christmastime reunion. Among them is rebellious ne’er-do-well Henri and the uptight Elizabeth. Together under the same roof for the first time in many years, their intricate, long denied resentments and yearnings emerge again.
While visiting her sister in Paris, a young woman finds romance and learns her brother-in-law is a philanderer.
A poor French teenage girl engages in an illicit affair with a wealthy Chinese heir in 1920s Saigon. For the first time in her young life she has control, and she wields it deftly over her besotted lover throughout a series of clandestine meetings and torrid encounters.