Ann Zacharias

Charles Duchemin, a well-known gourmet and publisher of a famous restaurant guide, is waging a war against fast food entrepreneur Tri- catel to save the French art of cooking. After having agreed to appear on a talk show to show his skills in naming food and wine by taste, he is confronted with two disasters: his son wants to become a clown rather than a restaurant tester and he, the famous Charles Duchemin, has lost his taste!

Modern-day Don Juan-styled Jeanne prides herself in the destruction of men who have fallen for her charms, and reveals to a priest the murder she has committed and honestly details her past sexual encounters.

Baker's apprentice Chris is sacked from his job for being late. Unwilling to give up the flat that goes with the job, he and his friends resort to squatting. Liv, a Swedish girl moves in and is soon followed by Léon the car mechanic and Rosette, a girl from the bakery.

Hans Castorp, fresh from university and about to become a civil engineer, comes to the Sanatorium Berghof in the Swiss Alps to visit his cousin Joachim, an army officer, who is recovering there from tuberculosis. Intending to remain at the Berghof for three weeks, Hans is gradually contaminated by the morbid atmosphere pervading the place. Wishing very much to be considered a patient like the others, he achieves his ends and stays in the sanatorium for ...seven years. During this time, he has enough time to take part in the furious philosophical debates pitting against each other Settembrini, a secular humanist, and Naphta, a totalitarian Jesuit. And to fall in love with the beautiful but enigmatic Clawdia Chauchat. When he is finally discharged in 1914 - along with all the other patients - it is only to plunge into the horrors of World War I.

In Genève, bookseller and publisher Axel Thorpe catches willful, rich 16-year-old Sibylle Ashby shoplifting. She brags about her writing, so he challenges her to produce a book. She writes an erotic novel that Thorpe publishes anonymously, and it becomes a best seller. She also tries to capture the love of this 40-year-old publisher but he drops her for her older sister.

An officers kadett is dismissed because of his strange behavior. At work he is considered deranged. At home he is dominated by his mother and fiancee. He manages to get a temporary job as a biology teacher, leave home and rent a room. He begins to flirt with a student.

"Life and Death" - A female reporter intended to go on a reporting trip about childbirth to Japan, declines the offer. Instead, she visits a maternity hospital in Sweden. She meets a doctor, who she has been in love for 15 years.

This somber drama chronicles the writings of Paltiel Kossover (Michel Jonasz), a Rumanian Jew who was incarcerated in a Stalinist prison. Zupanev (Erland Josephson) is a sympathetic court registrar who smuggles the documents and later presents them to the poet's son Grisha (Vincent David).