L'Exercice du pouvoir

Kamel, a young Arab raised in Paris, wants to become rich. He meets Edwige, a bourgeois girl, whose father disapproves of him as Edwige's boyfriend.

This is a light comedy about Amir, a young Pakistani who has been working for Jo for six years. Jo has a ready-to-wear clothes shop in the Sentier area and his business is prospering. He promised Amir that he would help him get his legal papers, but he has never kept his promise. Now he is sending Amir to his colleague Ralph in exchange for an unpaid debt from a card game. He thinks that this is a good opportunity to get rid of the illegal worker. Ralph is a fifty-year-old baby who keeps forgetting his appointments, his bank balance, and everything else that he should remember to run his life smoothly. His business is a complete disaster. A year later, Ralph's business has picked up, but Joe's is going down the drain. Thanks to whom? It is easy to answer this question if one follows Amir during his daily chores in the shop. But neither Jo nor Ralph's bother to take the time off to notice the hard work of this poor employee.

Two neurotics, working for a suicide hotline on the night of Christmas Eve, get caught up in a catastrophe when a pregnant woman, her abusive boyfriend, and a transvestite visit their office.

As a result of an automobile accident, a sophisticated TV producer meets her car mechanic/blue collar nemesis. They start a comic affair, but can they reconcile their totally different worlds?

The film starts in the 13th arrondissement of Paris in 1984. Robert Pinot is a police officer as ordinary as clumsy. One day, he stops a certain Josyane, a young drug addict who is also doubled as a pickpocket, nicknamed Marylou. Having discovered that she comes from the same village, Nanteuil, then him, he takes compassion for the young girl and decides to take her under his wing to keep her away from Tony, a dangerous dealer with whom she is in love.

Chantal, an advocate involved in defending homeless illegal immigrant, decides to refurbish her flat. Following her convictions she calls Columbian workers led by an unforeseeable architect. In the mean time a former client decides he is in love with her, her son and daughter are becoming nearly homeless since the flat's walls are demolished, the architect has new plans every day, an irregular workers fall in love with Chantal too and dance with her daughter, Martin (the son) still continue to roller blade around... Could the works go forward in this mess?

Princess Charlotte is scheduled to marry a boring duke, but before that event happens, Paul has taken a bet that he can seduce her. He does, profits from his act, and then falls in love with her. Meanwhile, the wedding with the duke is still planned, and it remains to be seen whether Paul will give in and give up.

In the 1930s, we follow the story of the laundress Berthe who marries the eldest son of a bourgeois family.

In French Algeria, after WWII, three daughters of wealthy settlers begin their adult lives. Zon marries an often absent sailor. Malene's husband, Gildas, refuses to work in the farm, so she has to take care of everything. Gritte, the youngest, does not want to marry and is a nurse for the natives. We will follow their three different destinies.