Claude Faraldo

Stephane, the wife of a prominent magistrate, shoots and kills a man in her home and claims he tried to rape her. While investigating her case, her lawyer becomes hopelessly enmeshed in a web of lies and subterfuges concerning her past.

On the hill in Saint-Cloud, in a broad street bordered by residences, a delivery man is going through the back of his van. He prepares the delivery: wine, water, alcohol... After checking the order he routinely loads the crate on his shoulder and strides under his load through a small delivery gate in the wall of a garden, he rings and enters... All the action will take place in one night, a single night, in this bourgeois house in Saint-Cloud.

Mathieu is called on by the French government to investigate murders in the Asian community of Paris. With Chinese and Vietnamese engaged in a bloody slaughterfest, the key to the mystery lies with the orphan girl who Mathieu helped to escape during the fall of Saigon in 1975. Now a beautiful young woman, Mathieu is reunited ten years later with the refugee, and together they attempt to solve the case. He uncovers a CIA plot that has carried over from the last days of the Vietnam War and that is related to the Paris murders.

This is a surreal comedy is about a factory set in a barren landscape that dispenses a minute portion of water to stragglers carrying pans as receptacles. Inside, the workers seem to be doing nothing that makes any sense, and they are watched over by a periscope set up by twins who run the factory. An unexplained, plain woman living on the premises is sought after by the whimsical foreman (Maurice Benichou) -- also known as the "gardener" because he has planted flowers in the coal wagons that remain on a maze of train tracks -- the only "stock" owned by the company.

Film montage of documents shot between 1895 and 1900 by the operators of the Lumière brothers.