Renaud Ménager

After raising her daughter, one would think that Julie's life was rather full. However, she recently got an offer from the French consul to a mission in Pondicherry, India to teach her skills to Indians. She can only do this if she gets her high-school diploma, something she neglected to do earlier. The idea of this new post motivates her to rectify her youthful omission, and she goes back to school in Montparnasse. Just before classes are to start, her current boyfriend's condescending ways prove too much for her, and she breaks up with him, reacting to that by getting drunk. Thus, when she has to take the subway to school on the first day, being unfamiliar with the route and somewhat the worse for wear, she gets lost. Fortunately, she meets an elderly man, a retired musician for the Paris Opera, who is headed for the very same destination. The two form a relationship of mutual encouragement and support.

Four young men try to gate crash a birthday party.

Shy working class 15 year-old Antoine, bored with life and school, breaks a leg and has young higher class Olivia help him with his studies. As he silently falls in love with her, he also falls in love with books and his will to become a writer.

An adolescent comes of age during a summer in the Rhône valley with his maternal grandparents. Jules seems a little too close to his mother and distant from his father, who wants Jules out of their Parisian house. It's to be a summer of transition, perhaps to a boarding school, and during these weeks in the country, Jules fishes with his grandfather; proves himself to the local youths, a group led by the bullying Red; takes on some tough guys; feels rejected by his mother; and, meets and pursues Evelyne, the village beauty. She's responsive, and Jules doesn't exactly know what to do next. Then, something happens that propels Jules into decisiveness and maturity.

In the 19th century, children -- particularly the children of the poor -- were considered to be an exploitable resource of docile and cheap labor. Anyone who had the effrontery to steal so much as a portion of a loaf of bread for any reason would (at the very least) go to prison, regardless of their age. However, people of conscience were beginning to protest against this situation. The story takes place in a prison for children where conditions are particularly harsh. The warden is a thick-headed martinet who demands complete compliance with the rules, or the children will be brutally dealt with. The assistant warden is a more modern man, and is appalled by the whole institution, but seeks to begin by reforming it. To that end, he has invited a journalist to come and see the conditions that prevail there, in the hopes that she will rouse public opinion against at least this one form of injustice.

A French civil servant throws The Governor's Party when his daughter comes of age regardless of colonial unrest and her parents' stormy marriage.