Louis-Ferdinand Céline

Alone on stage, at the dawn of his forties, Fabrice Luchini renders the reflections of the suburban doctor Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Benoît Jacquot, with his nuanced black and white, films the actor impregnated with words full of pain.

Playwright Jacques Deval directed this 1935 adaptation of his own stage comedy Tovaritch. Set in Paris, the story revolves around Princess Tatiana (Irene de Zilaby) and General Mikail (Andre Lefaur), two members of the Russian nobility who'd been forced to relocate to France after the Revolution. Though the regal couple has been entrusted with the Imperial crown jewels, they'd sooner starve to death than betray the late Czar by selling the gems. As a result, they're reduced to taking jobs as servants in the home of a wealthy but somewhat zany family. Robert E. Sherwood's Americanized version of Deval's Tovaritch was filmed by Warner Bros. in 1937, with Claudette Colbert and Charles Boyer.

Through the eyes of the best specialists on the writer and the many archives at our disposal, this new documentary series places Louis Destouches in the context of his time to better understand the role he played in Nazi-occupied France and the place he still occupies today in our collective memory.