The Escapade

A drunken, self-destructive woman called Betty wanders into a Parisian bar where she meets middle-aged alcoholic Laure. Laure decides to take care of Betty. Recovering in a hotel room, Betty begins to recount to Laure the story of her bourgeois life and her unhappy and unfaithful marriage.

Nour, a 14-year-old boy, is enjoying the summer holidays in the South of France. He is the youngest of four brothers. They live together in a council estate, caring for their mother who is in a coma. Nour dreams of escaping to a faraway place. When he crosses paths with Sarah, an Opera singer teaching summer classes, he finds the opportunity to come out of his shell and explore new horizons.

Marianne Winckler relocates to the port city of Caen in order to pass herself off as a member of a large community of itinerant workers desperate to make ends meet. She gains employment as a cleaner on a ferry travelling between Ouistreham and Portsmouth, recording the drudgery of the work she and her colleagues are required to do.

Michel is a young technician in the fledgling TV industry and is due for military service in two months at the time of the Algerian War. Juliette and Liliane are inseparable best friends, and aspiring actresses, who hang around outside the TV studio. Michel invites them in to watch, flirts with them both, and dates them separately and together. When Michel goes on a holiday to Corsica, just before he is drafted, the girls follow.

Transport Minister Bertrand Saint-Jean is awoken in the middle of the night by his head of staff. A bus has gone off the road into a gully. He has no choice but to go to the scene of the accident. Thus begins the odyssey of a politician in a world that is increasingly more complex and hostile.

On election night in 1981, celebrations spill out onto the street and there is an air of hope and change throughout Paris. But for Elisabeth, her marriage is coming to an end and she will now have to support herself and her two teenage children. She finds work at a late-night radio show and encounters a troubled teenager named Talulah whom she invites into her home.

Esther is at the end of her career as Head Seamstress at Dior Avenue Montaigne workshop. One day, she gets her handbag stolen in the metro by a 20 years old girl, Jade. Instead of calling the police she decides to take care of Jade. She sees in her the opportunity to pass on her skills, the craft of dressmaking, her only wealth. In the frenetic world of Haute Couture, Esther will give Jade la beauté du geste, a way to reach beyond herself.

Mathieu lives in Paris, Alice in a small seaside resort in Western France. He is a famous actor, about to turn fifty. She is a piano teacher in her forties. They were in love fifteen years ago, then separated. Time has passed. They each went their ways and slowly healed. When Mathieu goes try to overcome his melancholia in a thermal spa, he stumbles upon Alice.

Marie has had a tough childhood ever since her mother Elisa committed suicide. She has spent most of her life in an orphanage and now makes a living as a small time criminal in Paris. Now she wants to unravel her past and find her father whom she blames for her mother's death.

Garance is a young actress, but not a star. She manages everything as best she can, valiant, cheerful, a soldier, and she finds in alcohol an unconditional fuel, a source of comfort. Garance changes her life and begins an eight-year journey of moves, work, encounters, parties and anxieties, joys and hardships… An intimate, friendly, and sexual revolution. But she consumes, more and more. Until the very possibility of death…

Born out of wedlock early in the last century, Violette Leduc meets Simone de Beauvoir in postwar Saint-Germain-des-Près. An intense lifelong relationship develops between the two women authors, based on Violette's quest for freedom through writing and on Simone's conviction that she holds in her hands the destiny of an extraordinary writer.

Liane, 19 years old, daring and fiery, lives with her mother and little sister under the dusty sun of Fréjus in the South of France. Obsessed with beauty and the need to become “someone”, she sees reality TV as her opportunity to be loved... Fate smiles upon her when she auditions for “Miracle Island”.