Jean-Pierre Léaud

Three struggling artists try to make passable livings in Paris despite setbacks and tragedies. Three penniless artists become friends in modern-day Paris: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa, Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher, and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise. Rodolfo falls in love with Mimi, a barmaid. The day he asks her to move in with him, he is deported. Six months later, he sneaks back to Paris, and Mimi leaves her new boyfriend to be with him. Conflicts arise, especially around their poverty, and soon Mimi and Rodolfo separate, as do Marcel and his Musette. The three men scrape together a meal to celebrate All Saints' Day, and Mimi arrives, ill. Can her friends bring her back to health? Can love rekindle? —<jhailey@hotmail.com>

Henri is depressed after losing his job, but finds himself too afraid to go through with suicide. He hires a contract killer to do the job for him instead - but what happens if he changes his mind? After fifteen years' service, Henri Boulanger is made redundant from his job. Shocked, he attempts suicide, but can't go through with it, so he hires a contract killer in a seedy bar to murder him at some unspecified time in the future. But almost immediately he meets and falls in love with Margaret, a flower-seller, which makes Henri realise that his life has some meaning after all. But when he goes back to the bar to cancel the contract, he finds it has been demolished - and there's no way he can get in touch with the killer... —Michael Brooke <michael@everyman.demon.co.uk>

A romance between young Parisians, shown through a series of vignettes. Paul is young, just demobbed from national service in the French Army, and disillusioned with civilian life. As his girlfriend builds herself a career as a pop singer, Paul becomes more isolated from his friends and peers ('the children of Marx and Coca Cola', as the credits announce) and their social and emotional politics. —D.Giddings <darren.giddings@newcastle.ac.uk> A series of vignettes about youth culture in current day urban France are presented. These vignettes are tied together by a central thread, the story of twenty-one year old Paul, who witnesses or overhears many of these happenings. He has just completed his eighteen month mandatory military service, and thus is just beginning the real phase of being what would be considered his adult life. His thoughts affected by events around him like the Vietnam War, Paul gets a job writing through an acquaintance, Madeleine, an aspiring pop singer, which is contrary to Paul's more traditional cultural leanings of baroque music and literature. The two begin to date, and out of circumstance Paul eventually ends up moving in with Madeleine and her two roommates Elisabeth and Catherine. Paul, who believes he has fallen in love with Madeleine, doesn't know what their future holds as he spends time with all three women, to which Paul's friend, fellow writer Robert, aspires. As Paul changes careers to working for a public opinion polling firm, he may have what he considers a better understanding of life as he listens to the opinions of his contemporaries. —Huggo