1934. Philippe falls in love with Odile, a beautiful stranger, and decides to marry her, against the will of his parents. They would have preferred a more bourgeois bride, ideally from their own milieu: the paper industry in Angoulême. Isabelle, for instance, whom they have known since she was a child, would have been the perfect match. But Philippe sticks to his choice and marries Odile. At first the newly-weds are passionately in love, and the whole family looks forward to the birth of an heir for the Marcenat family. But in vain. Instead, Odile neglects her marriage and devotes herself to drawing, a gift she inherited from her father. Or is her rekindled interest in art classes more the result of her encounter with the charming but mysterious artist François Crozant? Philippe sense that he's losing his wife and becomes madly jealous of François. Meanwhile Isabelle, who's secretly in love with Philippe, is just waiting for the right moment.
1934. Philippe falls in love with Odile, a beautiful stranger, and decides to marry her, against the will of his parents. They would have preferred a more bourgeois bride, ideally from their own milieu: the paper industry in Angoulême. Isabelle, for instance, whom they have known since she was a child, would have been the perfect match. But Philippe sticks to his choice and marries Odile. At first the newly-weds are passionately in love, and the whole family looks forward to the birth of an heir for the Marcenat family. But in vain. Instead, Odile neglects her marriage and devotes herself to drawing, a gift she inherited from her father. Or is her rekindled interest in art classes more the result of her encounter with the charming but mysterious artist François Crozant? Philippe sense that he's losing his wife and becomes madly jealous of François. Meanwhile Isabelle, who's secretly in love with Philippe, is just waiting for the right moment.
In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.
The film depicts events between the Fashoda crisis in 1898 and the 1904 signing of the Entente Cordiale creating an alliance between Britain and France and ending their historic rivalry. It was based on the book King Edward VII and His Times by André Maurois. It was made with an eye to its propaganda value, following the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and in anticipation of the outbreak of a Second World War which would test the bonds between Britain and France in a conflict with Nazi Germany.
