Naturally optimistic and mischievous, Jérôme Aubin crossed the time of his adolescence, around 1945, with ease and good humor. The years passed. He married the pretty Françoise, a little neighbor he had known since the age of eight, and soon found himself a secondary school teacher, a little anxious at the thought of facing for the first time students he had been told were particularly turbulent. How will he master this new difficulty? Better than you'd think, thanks to a delicious optimism: boldly going against the grain of conventional methods, he surprises his young audience, thwarting the plans of the dissipated gossips and turning their most tendentious attitudes to his advantage. All this provokes astonishment and concern among the college's leaders. But Jérôme Aubin is no pushover, and even the dreaded general supervisor finds himself obliged to give in to his most audacious initiatives...

Issu d’une famille d’industriels de Bretagne, Jean Rochefort, élève médiocre, se rêve dès son enfance en comédien, vouant une immense admiration à Buster Keaton. En 1949, à 19 ans, il entre au Conservatoire national supérieur d’art dramatique de Paris où il noue une indéfectible amitié avec ses condisciples Jean-Paul Belmondo, Claude Rich et Jean-Pierre Marielle. Après des débuts sur les planches, Delphine Seyrig, qui le révèle au théâtre, le propulse au cinéma en lui conseillant de cesser de faire le pitre. Grâce à elle, la palette de son jeu s’étoffe et, en 1976, il décroche le César du meilleur acteur dans un second rôle pour Que la fête commence de Bertrand Tavernier.

1993 film by Yves Robert

While celebrating his birthday, police inspector Basquier recalls two of his most celebrated cases. The first involves duplicitous moneylender Olga. The second concerns the brutal broad daylight murder of innocent young Yvonne.

Following "The Two of Us", Claude is now 21 years old. Content with his life, he has a girlfriend Tania and he aspires to become an actor. When he receives his draft notice, a friend convinces Claude he can get out of military service with his connections in Paris. When the connections fall through, Claude is sent for basic training outside Paris before being shipped off to Algeria. His stops in Morocco and Algeria are uneventful as far as military action goes. He returns home with few bad memories of his army life ...

A thief known as Simon the Swiss faces up and downs in his criminal profession.

Louise lives alone and seems to like it that way. She has been through a divorce and the recent death of her mother. Recently, she has moved to Annecy, a moderate-sized city, to take work as a schoolteacher. She encounters a much younger man, Luigi, an Italian who is down on his luck. Though he moved to France to find work, he was robbed of his money and papers and is stranded. When he helps her bury her dogs, which her neighbour has poisoned for barking, their relationship grows to a new level.

Lieve is a Belgian woman who marries just as World War II is beginning. When the Germans invade, her husband goes off to fight them, but he swiftly returns home after the invasion succeeds. Later, he decides that the Germans are on the right side of things, and goes off to fight for them on the Eastern Front. Soon afterward, a resistance fighter is stranded on her doorway, and she hides him. The two of them fall in love, and the conflicts and joys of this relationship cause Lieve continued grief well after the end of the war.