Alexie Ribes

They stick to our skin and soul, our clothes. We believe we buy them, they own us. Warning ! these rags are traitors: far from dressing us they expose our complexes, our moods ... Clinging to their hangers, to our memories too, they exercise an underhand dictatorship. Snuggled up, huddled together, they build a bulwark against oblivion in our closets. Often stained for eternity with ink or redcurrant, impregnated with perfume, tears sometimes, piled up or messed up on our shelves, they remain forever linked to the happy or unhappy chapters of our life. It is through the evocation of their wardrobe that Gigi, Eve, Marie, Nora, Françoise, Amanda, Lisa and the others evoke the past, missed appointments and those that changed their lives, the joys and childhood revolts, giggles, disappointments, dramas, parties and hopes too…

Happily married with a daughter, Marc is a successful real estate agent in Aix-en-Provence. One day, he has an appointment with a woman to view a traditional country house. A few hours later, Marc finally puts a name to her face. It's Cathy, the girl he was in love with growing up in Oran, Algeria, in the last days of the French colonial regime. Marc hurries to her hotel. They spend the night together. Then she's gone again. And Marc's mother tells him Cathy never left Algeria. She was killed with her father in a bombing just before independence...

Paris 1577 - King Henri III gives famous couturier Pic Saint Loup a crucial diplomatic mission. He must go to Spain to make a magnificent gown for the wedding of the King's nephew to the daughter of a Spanish noble. The trouble is that the real creative brains behind Saint Loup's outfit is his Moorish assistant, while his perfumer is a Marano Jew and his hairdresser is out, loud and very proud. And Catholic Spain, in the grip of the Inquisition, is no place for Arabs, Jews and homosexuals (Saint Loup is anything but heterosexual). To make matters worse, his secretary is an undercover Protestant plotting revenge for the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and the father of the bride turns out to be the Chief Inquisitor of Cordoba.

Un conservateur terrorisé par les plantes vertes, une mère plastifiée pour être exposée, un ballet de Saintes Vierges, des gardiens épuisés par Rodin, un ministre perdu dans une exposition de sexes, une voiture disparue au parking Rembrandt, des provinciaux amoureux des Impressionnistes, touristes galopins galopant d'une salle à l'autre, passager clandestin dans l'art premier, Picasso, Gauguin, Warhol, ils sont tous là dans ce petit monde qui ressemble au grand, dans ce musée pas si imaginaire que ça, valsant la comédie humaine jusqu'au burlesque.

Loosely based on "4.50 from Paddington" by Agatha Christie.