Yves Dangerfield

Late 17th Century: Anne de Grandcamp and Lucie de Fontenelle, two little girls from Normandy, arrive at the Saint-Cyr school founded by Madame de Maintenon for educating the daughters of impoverished nobles ruined in wars and making them into free women. Madame de Maintenon is the secret wife of Louis XIV, and empowered by his support, she offers "her" two hundred fifty girls a playful and avant-garde education. Anne and Lucie, two inseparable friends, allow themselves to be carried away by the promise of a bright future. But Maintenon has arrived at the pinnacle of power through scheming and debasing herself and she now fears the fires of hell. She is counting on her model school to atone for her past sins.

After a confinement in a harem, an illiterate Algerian takes her revenge by reinventing herself as a writer. Under the name of Elissa Rhaïs, she becomes the darling of the literary Paris of the inter-war period, in search of oriental fantasies.

Simon lives in an affluent intellectual environment, headed by his mother Alice. Raphael, his cousin, belongs to the poor branch of the family, but Simon adores him. So he decides to help him become a writer.

On 9 January 1836, Pierre Lacenaire goes to the guillotine, a murderer and a thief. He gives Allard, a police inspector, his life story, written while awaiting execution. He also asks Allard to care for Hermine, a lass to whom he has been guardian for more than ten years. In flashbacks, from the prison as Lacenaire writes, from Allard's study as he and Hermine read, and from other readers' memory after the book is published, we see Lacenaire's childhood as he stands up to bullies, including priests, his youthful thieving, his first murder, his brief army career, his seduction of a princess, and his affair with Avril, a young man who dies beside him.

The tragic story of Vincent van Gogh broadened by focusing as well on his brother Theodore, who helped support Vincent. Based on the letters written between the two.

25 year-old Hippo doesn't have a job, doesn't study either but lives from the money his younger brother earns with dealing and from occasional Poker winnings.

This drama attempts to be a film within a film. In the outer story, Andre Dussolier stars as a film director working with drama students at the Paris Conservatory, making a film (the inner story) about a woman's obsession with a foreign desert. Wallowing in maudlin sentimentality, this feature fails to live up to the promise of its probable inspiration, Fame (1980), and was not well-received at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. However, as a medium for instructing director Francis Girod's actual students at the Paris Conservatory about the art and perils of filmmaking, it was undoubtedly a good deal more successful.