Maurice Sevenant

Jean-Pierre, a twenty-three-year-old Belgian theater actor, is engaged to a charming seamstress, Anne Jacquemin, who dreams of nothing else but a quiet married life with children. Belonging to a Brussels company, Jean-Pierre wants to experience more and decides to join a stock company that performs in the South of France. There he meets Juliette Allard, a young dancer who is the lookalike of Anne. As beautiful as her, she is more mysterious and fascinating than Anne. Jean-Pierre loves both: will he be able to choose between these two equally appealing women?

Hélène Noris, a young Belgian woman from a bourgeois family, is haunted by a past affair with Tamara — now married to her father. Torn between desire and resentment toward Tamara’s conformist life, Hélène feels alienated in the provincial world she inhabits. To boost his social image, her stepfather René invites Parisian director Jean Gerfaud to stage an avant-garde version of Tartuffe. Tamara flirts with him, but Hélène seduces him first. A passionate, destructive affair begins, entangling love, jealousy, and ambition. When the play’s scandalous premiere sparks outrage, Jean marries Hélène, provoking Tamara’s fury. Yet Hélène, restless and defiant, betrays him with a soldier. In rage and humiliation, Jean confronts her in the “red room,” the space that once embodied their love and now their ruin.

Set in an imaginary country where the trombone orchestra is the heart of power and photographs have a natural size that limits the number of trombone players that can appear on their official picture.

The story of a dysfunctional family in a miserable butcher shop.