François Mauriac

An unhappily married woman struggles to break free from social pressures and her boring suburban setting.

A doctor and his son fall in love for the same woman, who has lost her child.

"In Search of Marcel Proust" is a 1962 literary documentary directed by the Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci. It serves as a biographical and critical journey into the world of Marcel Proust, blending readings from his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, with rare filmed testimonies from those who knew him personally, including his housekeeper Céleste Albaret and friends like Jean Cocteau and François Mauriac.

Two brothers-in-law hate each other but, for business interests, they want their respective son and daughter to marry. The young fiancées are not in agreement, as the boy has a happy relationship with a woman, and the girl is in an isolation mood. A crime happens, and the relations amongst this sad family become even worse.

Twenty years have passed. Thérèse lives alone in Paris. We exiled her there. She seems to be asking nothing more for life. She is sick and lives in slow motion. One day, we ring rue du Bac. It is Mary, her daughter, whom she sees so little. She is twenty years old now and comes to see her to escape her middle-class south-west. She is very in love with a boy, she expects from her mother a support, a freedom of point of view. His name is Murad. The arrival of her daughter awakens Therese with her reserve and torpor. It does not shock Mary, who is very busy with her love. Thérèse proposes to meet Mourad. She quickly understands that he is not willing to marry Mary but wants her without wanting to bond more deeply to her. It is she Therese, that the young man looks ... She wanted to help her daughter to be happy, a wish too official not to be suspicious. Here she is delivered to the power of her own seduction ...

Thérèse is living in a provincial town, unhappily married to Bernard, a dull, pompous man whose only interest is preserving his family name and property. They live in an isolated country mansion surrounded by servants. Early in her marriage her only comforts are her fondness for Bernard's pine-tree forest, which was her primary reason for marrying him, and her love for her sister-in-law and Bernard's half-sister, Anne. The movie recounts in flashback the circumstances that led to her being charged with poisoning her husband.

In the 1930s, in a village in Gironde, Guillou, a young boy in need of affection, nicknamed the Sagouin, unhappy and in need of affection, leads a life of anguish and sadness in a sinister castle. He exasperates his mother who sees in him only the hated reflection of a husband she only married to become a baroness. Thanks to the kindness of the village teacher, Guillou glimpses for a moment the existence of another world, of gentleness and tenderness.

Les Cent Livres des Hommes (ORTF, 1969-1973) was a series of literary programs created by Claude Santelli and Françoise Verny, and produced notably by Santelli, Jean Archimbaud, and Serge Moati. Planned for one hundred episodes but completed at thirty-nine, the series aimed to introduce great literary works, 'chefs-d’œuvre', to a younger audience through a mix of dramatization, reading, and documentary techniques. It marked a transfer of cultural legitimacy from writers and critics to a generation of television producers, offering a new model of educational and creative literary broadcasting - 'télévision d’auteur'.