The Other Louis

Ten young people (boys and girls) at the age at which all is possible. They meet, they love, they choose. The film comes and goes between all those people, revealing their anguish, their dreams, depicting the portrait of a generation of the '90s which has both the fury and the fear of life.

October 1941. Eighteen months into France’s occupation by German troops, young Communist members of the Resistance shoot dead an officer of the German Army. In retaliation, Hitler demands the deaths of 150 Frenchmen, as 'retribution'. The targets are to be mostly young men believed to share the assassins’ political convictions. Most of these men are taken from an internment camp for opponents of the occupation; a 35-year-old French rural administrator is ordered to select the victims. Although the parish priest appeals to their conscience and moral sensibilities, both the German military and their French helpers slavishly follow their orders.

A good-looking but naive lad leaves his mountain village to try and make his way in Paris. He thinks maybe he will try acting but things don't go too well for him. Eventually he is forced to sell himself to men and though he meets an attractive girl she is herself a prostitute with a vicious pimp.

Lucie makes her living selling bathing costumes on the beach at Marseilles. She would like that her ten-year long boyfriend, Lucien, becomes her best friend. But this requires truth. For Lucien, newly made secret agent who has to play a young idler, it is mission impossible. Even more so when a young american beauty will ask him to initiate her into sensual pleasures.

Aylin, a promising actress in France, must return to Turkey urgently to see her seriously ill father. But the bureaucratic problems she faces, force her to make a tough decision: If she goes back to her homeland she won't be able to return and if she stays she won't be able to say goodbye to her father. The clock keeps ticking for Aylin.

Hugues is forty years old. He's an actor but he doesn't want to perform. He's taken refuge with Serge, his partner, in the house where he grew up. However, Micheline, a director, insists that he tread the boards once again. Serge gives him an ultimatum: it's him or the play. Hugues chooses the play. When rehearsals start, Hugues, alone in the house, discovers naked people frolicking in the field adjoining the garden.

Twenty-year-old Eugène is somewhat aimless and has not been doing well in university. He is staying in a small village for the summer. He awkwardly seduces Pierre, a slightly older man who is working for Mathilde as caretaker for the season. Pierre is initially open to the relationship, but quickly becomes reluctant to become too involved.

It could have been a normal day for Virgile, but that's not the way it turned out. After being the victim of a strange attack, the young man is then forced to share a dressing room with Robert Lesmur, the main actor of the play in which he plays an extra. A disturbing character, Robert stimulates feelings in Virgile that will quickly overwhelm him.

In a cinema, the day of the premiere of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes (adapted from his novel), Boris Vian has a heart attack. During his discomfort, he relives the major stages of his life: the meeting with Raymond Queneau, the nights of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the scandal of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, his love stories with Michelle Léglise then Ursula Kubler or his relationship with Jean-Paul Sartre. Through his memories, Boris Vian relives all his “parallel lives”.