Louise - Opera National de Paris

A surreal odyssey in which a melancholic maidservant crosses paths with a homicidal little boy, travels to a tiny island of pirates and encounters a man with multiple personalities.

Eloi, a paunchy middle-aged man, finds Samuel, a young sad sack, about to kill himself by plunging into the sea. Eloi takes Samuel under his wing, giving him a hot meal and bringing him to a seedy night club to introduce him to Esperança, who is said to be the most beautiful sex worker in Lisbon—and is also Eloi’s daughter.

Ariel, a young French Jew, decides to leave his family to go to Israel and secretly become an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret service. After years of training, his first mission is in Paris to steal secrets from Remy Prieur, a French atomic scientist.

An attorney defends a young man on trial for killing his aunt — a psychiatrist who took him in to study possible homicidal tendencies.

In early 1920s France, an author, lying on his deathbed, looks at various photographs and is flooded with memories of the people and events that have shaped his life.

Jean-Louis and Anne have had their fling and separated. Now 20 years have passed. He is still dating various women. She is now a big-time director whose most recent film was a very expensive bomb. She comes up with the idea of making a romance based upon her fling with Jean-Louis. She contacts him to gain his permission. Jean-Louis is still in racing and goes away for a desert rally while she begins filming. She finds the mood of their romance difficult to recapture in her film.

In the forest, the animals and insects are playing and dancing. The Forester enters and lies down against a tree for a nap. A curious Vixen Cub inquisitively chases a frog right into the lap of the surprised forester who forcibly takes the vixen home as a pet. Time passes and we see the Vixen, now grown up into a young adult tied up in the forester's yard with the conservative old dachshund. Fed up with life in confinement, the vixen chews through her rope and runs off to freedom.

Performance of Janacek's opera performed/streamed live in Vienna on April 27th, 2017.

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.