Gérard Desarthe

The Conquistadores

A young couple: Victor is a musician, Claire is a secretary in a publishing house. Their daily life seems so disappointing, so monotonous, that they begin to spend their time daydreaming, both creating their own imaginary world. At the office, she writes the story of an heroine's imaginary life. He collects material to compose an opera which glorifies the conquistadors.

Uranus

After World War II, a small French village struggles to put the war behind as the controlling Communist Party tries to flush out Petain loyalists. The local bar owner, a simple man who likes to write poetry, who only wants to be left alone to do his job, becomes a target for Communist harassment as they try and locate a particular loyalist, and he pushes back.

La Baston

After doing some time in jail, René has finally said goodbye to his criminal past. But when his son is mortally ill and in desperate need of expensive medical help, René can't refuse the offer to crack a safe in a villa. What René and his pals don't know is that they serve as a decoy for criminals who have much bigger plans. Can he escape from the police?

Cherokee

In this detective and crime comedy, the heir to a large fortune is an unknown, and nobody knows him or where he can be found. An occasional musician, Fred plans to pass himself off as that man. It's a goofy idea, but maybe it will work. However, before he can set up the con properly, he learns that his loser of a brother has, inexplicably, just gotten his first job in years as one of the detectives who is searching for the heir. At one time, the two brothers played together in an amateur rock band, but as a result of a heated disagreement about how to play the Ray Noble standard "Cherokee", the two haven't spoken in years. It's going to take a lot of persuading to pull this scam off.

The Elegant Criminal

On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.

The Wounded Man

A fleeting encounter in a train station draws a withdrawn young man into a shadowy world of desire and danger. As obsession deepens, innocence destroyed, and an irreversible transformation begins.

The Eyes Closed

Protagonist is the young actor Yvan. During a tour, he witnesses the inexplicable suicide of one of his fellow actors. Back in Paris he tells Xénie, the ex-lover of the dead actor. Xénie is in love with Yvan, but the latter sinks deeper and deeper into a personal crisis. At a certain point he acts being blind and buys a pair of glasses with black lenses. He is fascinated by his new, more restricted manner of seeing and refuses to open his eyes. Reality makes way for his more and more obsessive imagination. The mixture of fantasy and reality meant that Santoni's approach was compared with that of Buñuel.

Je tue à la campagne

The Conquistadores

A young couple: Victor is a musician, Claire is a secretary in a publishing house. Their daily life seems so disappointing, so monotonous, that they begin to spend their time daydreaming, both creating their own imaginary world. At the office, she writes the story of an heroine's imaginary life. He collects material to compose an opera which glorifies the conquistadors.

Uranus

After World War II, a small French village struggles to put the war behind as the controlling Communist Party tries to flush out Petain loyalists. The local bar owner, a simple man who likes to write poetry, who only wants to be left alone to do his job, becomes a target for Communist harassment as they try and locate a particular loyalist, and he pushes back.

La Baston

After doing some time in jail, René has finally said goodbye to his criminal past. But when his son is mortally ill and in desperate need of expensive medical help, René can't refuse the offer to crack a safe in a villa. What René and his pals don't know is that they serve as a decoy for criminals who have much bigger plans. Can he escape from the police?

Cherokee

In this detective and crime comedy, the heir to a large fortune is an unknown, and nobody knows him or where he can be found. An occasional musician, Fred plans to pass himself off as that man. It's a goofy idea, but maybe it will work. However, before he can set up the con properly, he learns that his loser of a brother has, inexplicably, just gotten his first job in years as one of the detectives who is searching for the heir. At one time, the two brothers played together in an amateur rock band, but as a result of a heated disagreement about how to play the Ray Noble standard "Cherokee", the two haven't spoken in years. It's going to take a lot of persuading to pull this scam off.

The Elegant Criminal

On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.

The Wounded Man

A fleeting encounter in a train station draws a withdrawn young man into a shadowy world of desire and danger. As obsession deepens, innocence destroyed, and an irreversible transformation begins.

The Eyes Closed

Protagonist is the young actor Yvan. During a tour, he witnesses the inexplicable suicide of one of his fellow actors. Back in Paris he tells Xénie, the ex-lover of the dead actor. Xénie is in love with Yvan, but the latter sinks deeper and deeper into a personal crisis. At a certain point he acts being blind and buys a pair of glasses with black lenses. He is fascinated by his new, more restricted manner of seeing and refuses to open his eyes. Reality makes way for his more and more obsessive imagination. The mixture of fantasy and reality meant that Santoni's approach was compared with that of Buñuel.

Je tue à la campagne

Peer Gynt

Priest Daens

In the 1890s, Father Adolf Daens goes to Aalst, a textile town where child labor is rife, pay and working conditions are horrible, the poor have no vote, and the Catholic church backs the petite bourgeoisie in oppressing workers. He writes a few columns for the Catholic paper, and soon workers are listening and the powerful are in an uproar. He's expelled from the Catholic party, so he starts the Christian Democrats and is elected to Parliament. After Rome disciplines him, he must choose between two callings, as priest and as champion of workers. In subplots, a courageous young woman falls in love with a socialist and survives a shop foreman's rape; children die; prelates play billiards.

Let Joy Reign Supreme

A look at 18th-century France, when the depravity of the authorities contributed to social oppression, and the uprisings flared up one after another.

A Love in Germany

In May of 1983, a man turns 49 and, with his 17-year old son, journeys to the village in Baden that he left 40 years before. He wants to discover what happened then, the truth about an affair his mother had with a young Polish prisoner of war, how the authorities came to learn of it, the lovers' arrest, and the aftermath. While his son takes Polaroid photographs, he retraces the steps of his childhood and interviews those who should remember. The story is disclosed in flashbacks that focus on the lovers (Paulina and Stanislaus), on a jealous and conniving neighbor, and on Mayer, the local SS commander who wants to find a way out of inevitable consequences.

The Police War

Fush and Ballestrat are the heads of each department of the French police. Both have the task of combating serious crime and cleaning up the underworld.

The Ponzi Scheme

Ponzi, from his arrival in Boston in 1903, to hi death in Rio in 1949. He made himself famous in inventing the first fraud of modern times on a large scale, and inspired Bernard Madoff.

La Question ordinaire

A woman wants to film a prisoner being tortured.

Jaune, Le Soleil

The whole film takes place in a single room where representatives of the two political forces and their enemy "the Jew" are gathered. A female character establishes the dialogue between these individuals and comments on the ideology of each; Until the final scene where everyone seems to rally to a common idea.

Travail du comédien

We follow the rehearsals and the staging work of Bertold Brecht's play 'Dans la jungle des villes' in 1972 by the company Théâtre de l'Espérance. The three directors: Jean-Pierre Vincent, Jean Jourdheuil and André Engel discuss their joint work of staging and their vision of the play. Interviews with the actors (Gérard Desarthe, Maurice Bénichou, Hélène Vincent), whom we follow at different stages of the work (source: Média Scérén). The film was screened for the 1973 Directors' Fortnight, at the Cannes Festival.

La Sainte Famille

The story of a traditional Catholic family in northern France, part of society but subject to all its changes.

Notti e nebbie

Milan, the last months of WWII. While everything starts to crumble down, RSI police chief Bruno Spada tries to crush the local anti-fascist resistance.

Stella

During the Second World War, Yvon joins the Gestapo to save his Jewish girlfriend, Stella, from deportation. When France is liberated, he has to answer for his past. Hunted, he decides to escape to Spain, but Stella refuses to go with him.

Bye Bye Barbara

A chance meeting with an alluring stranger leads a sports journalist down a twisted path of deception.

The French Calvinists

A few years after the revocation of theEdict of Nantes, the Camisards, Protestants from the Cévennes region, mostly peasants and silk workers, formed groups following Gédéon Laporte and fought Louis XIV's dragoons.

France, Incorporated

In the year 2222, a former drug dealer is kept in a state of hibernation. Reanimated, he tells his story. Leader in the narcotics market, his situation was prosperous until, during a political change, the government legalized its use.

Hecate

Set amid the European community in an unspecified North African country, a colony on the verge of nationalism just before the war. And colonized is what happens to a French diplomat, Julien Rochelle, when he meets the mysterious beauty Clothilde de Watteville. Schmid 's favorite axiom, that love is projection, never had such a thorough airing. Is Clothilde really the wife of a French official now holed up in Siberia? Or is she Hecate, goddess of black magic and devourer of the Arab boys she meets far from the European quarter? Only our projections know for sure; for the rest, she is a "woman looking out into the night." Drawn from a novel by Paul Morand, who based the main character on his wife Helene, Schmid's film achieves an atmosphere of magic in which psychological credibility is not so much absent as irrelevant-a film that distances itself from the drama it invokes, perhaps as the elusive Clothilde turns her back on the madness she provokes.

La Confession d'un enfant du siècle

Ange de feu

Suicidal Françoise Sorel wants to be buried in Castelnac, the village she was born in Périgord. Her daughter Lola, discovers she doesn't know anything about her parents and their past life. She spends a few days in Castelnac. A man, an ex-friend of her father's, is murdered and Lola is the main suspect...

Le Mystérieux Docteur Cornélius

Thérèse Humbert