Gifts

A 50-something man wanders a lonely beach drinking and thinking of a friend he has just lost. Strange how the young man that he meets is so similar.

Except for Amine and Kimmy, the young couple of neighbors she meets regularly, visitors are rare in Constance Brunel's antique store. Loneliness is also her life. One night, Amine, in a panic, seeks help at her house: Kimmy has fallen badly when she slipped and she has killed herself. Thinking that the police will not believe this version because of his judicial past, Amine borrows Constance's car to take the corpse and make it disappear. In the days that follow, this shared secret brings Constance and Amine closer. But one morning, an anonymous letter accompanied by photos demands a ransom: someone in the building has seen everything, the blackmail begins.

On Christmas Eve, Léa and Juliette, a couple, want to rob a supermarket that Juliette knows is empty of surveillance on this festive evening. But, as much for each of them as for Eric, the vigil who is there after all, nothing will happen as planned. Besides, shortly before leaving him alone, the store manager gave Eric a gun, just in case.

A devoted young woman becomes ensnared in a web of sexuality and betrayal in Jean-Pascal Hattu’s consistently unpredictable and finely wrought character study. A vividly realistic psychosexual drama, the film’s sharp emotional honesty heralds a distinct new voice from a promising young director. Hattu soon reveals that Maite’s husband Vincent is in prison for an unspecified crime, and that she has promised to wait for him and attend to his laundry (if not his conjugal needs) during his incarceration. On one of her weekly visits, Maite meets Jean, an oddly inquisitive and boldly flirtatious prison warden, and soon the two commence a joyless affair. Seemingly smitten with Maite, Jean, in a gesture of kindness to his lover, eases up on her husband behind bars; the two become pals and even engage in some homoerotic shower talk. —Robert O’Shaughnessy