Paris, summer 2020. Actors from “la Comédie-Française”, France’s most prestigious theater, rehearse Christophe Honoré’s new play, an adaptation of Marcel Proust’s “The Guermantes Way”. When the show is suddenly canceled, the drama group decides to go ahead with it anyway, in the name of art and for the joy of acting together.
Paul is preparing to leave Tajikistan, while thinking back on his adolescent years. His childhood, his mother's madness, the parties, the trip to the USSR where he lost his virginity, the friend who betrayed him and the love of his life.
The Forest is both a vibrantly spontaneous and brutally funny family drama, and a glorious tribute to acting and theater - in other words, an Arnaud Desplechin film. With Michel Vuillermoz and Denis Podalydès as the nephew and his friend, Adeline D’Hermy as the niece, and Martine Chevallier in a stunning performance as the sublimely selfish aunt Raissa.
How to become a man when your mother and your closed circle have decided otherwise? This is the challenge Guillaume took up. The film recounts Guillaume's tragicomic battle from the young age of eight, as he adopts the role of a girl then of a homosexual... until, aged 30, he meets the woman who, after his mother, will become the other woman in his life. Beyond this story of a heterosexual coming-out, the film tells the tale of an actor who never stopped loving women, maybe even a little too much.
At Versailles, the last rehearsal of a play, ordered to molière by Louis XIV the king. Staged in their own characters, actors and author display their art's conception. It is, too, the opportunity for them to answer by irony to their detractors.
The Venetian performance world is on the alert: an impresario is looking for talent to stage what he defines as the most beautiful opera of his time. Everyone goes there from their pushy little merry-go-round to attract the favors of the character and extricate themselves from misery. But the main interested party hardly seems to be sensitive to these effects.
