Bernard Fresson Movies List

In Lyon, where many are unemployed, Marie is a prostitute who loves her work: she's thoughtful and exuberant toward clients old and young, slim or flabby. One night, a homeless man sleeps in the foyer of her apartment house; she gives him a hot meal, then a place on the floor to sleep by her radiator, then she offers herself. She falls in love, giving him new life, clothes, a place to live. When he grouses that he must bar hop while she uses the flat for her work, she finds them a larger flat. He grows restless, seducing a manicurist and pressing her to prostitution. He's arrested for procuring, so Marie must decide what to do; he, too, must face the consequences of his choices.

Gallery director Stanislas bolsters the development of modern art with his collection of surprising works. His newest acquisition is a sculpture by Gilbert, whose wife Josée is captivated by Stanislas. But unbeknownst to her, Stanislas is amassing photographs of a very perverse, disturbed nature.

Fred works for an insurance company as a computer engineer. He is bored with enduring the trials of his shrewish wife, so, after using actuarial tables to calculate the most common means of death, he cleverly prepares the family bathroom and brings about her demise. For a while he is content with his new freedom, but then he recognizes that a friend is in a similar situation.

A serial killer is on the loose in Paris and he seems to be an american citizen working in the US embassy and being in the middle of a french-american economical affair.

Because "Tante Zita" main theme is death: a twenty-year old girl, Annie (Shimkus) lives with her mother and her aunt (both played by first-class actresses Suzanne Flon and Katina Paxinou). The auntie is dying, and for the first time in her life, Annie has to cope with death. One night, she finds it too hard to bear, and leaving home where the old woman is suffering, she begins to hang around in Paris. She will meet people, and, from dusk to dawn, she will learn to leave her childhood behind and to grow into a woman.

An ageing surgeon falls in love with a thirteen-year-old girl.

Henri Serin, a sales rep in umbrellas who lives in Saumur, is bored with his life. Married to an unloving, uptight wife, who, unlike him, has no interest in sex, he is also rejected by his children. Thus, he spends most of his time travelling from town to town, flirting with women and meeting all kinds of people in the hotels, restaurants, shops and places he visits. He also dabbles in painting, particularly portraits. After his car breaks down as he is driving through Brittany, he meets a rough, foul-mouthed painter who offers him to stay at his house, near Pont-Aven. There, Henri falls in love with Angela, the painter's model and fling, and soon they run off together...

Genua, 3rd October 1985. Together with over 500 other passengers Margot and Pierre Bergeron, a married couple from France, the Serafinis, an Italian family, Anne Higgins, an Englishwoman, Gitta and Helmut Holzer from Germany and an American couple called Marilyn and Leon Klinghoffer board the 'Achille Lauro'. The mood is cheerful and relaxed, everyone is looking forward to twelve days of sun, sea and peace. No one suspects that there are four Palestinian terrorists among the passengers: Al Assadi, Fatayer, Al Ashker and Molqi, their leader. The ship puts to sea in perfect weather. Three marvellous days follow. Everyone appears to be happy and contented. But in the case of some of the passengers appearances are deceiving. Marilyn Klinghoffer, for example, only pretends to her crippled husband that she is well and happy; in reality she is seriously ill with cancer and knows that this will be her last voyage. She does not want to upset her husband, however. A crisis is brewing between ...

A comedy drama that played the festival circuit before vanishing without trace. Forsythe, Sweeney and Miranda are the trio of stepbrothers accompanying paralysed father Fuller on a jaunt to Normandy, where the old boy saw combat and romantic action during the war. Jennifer Beals, a regular in husband Rockwell's movies, plays a transvestite.

Georges,a trucker, is the single father of young Frédéric. His job prevents him from seeing his son as often as he could, as often as he should. Brought up by his grandparents, Frédéric proves a difficult child. His only friend is his twelve-year-old neighbor Rose. One day, Georges tells his son how Agnès, his mother, abandoned him at birth. Upset by such a revelation, Frédéric decides to be revenged...

Chick fell in love with Alise because of a shared passion for writer Jean-Sol Partre who gradually devoured their relationship. Soon after, Colin, the main character, also falls in love with a young girl, Chloe, but after their marriage she soon suffers from a strange illness: a water lily grows in her lungs.

A notorious French madam, whose business serves many of the nation's most powerful individuals, plans to go international until she becomes the focus of media scrutiny.

Sebastien Grenier, a former French spy, is working as a financial analyst in Zurich. However, his peaceful existence starts to disintegrate when he is recruited by a top French intelligence operative to discover how one of their own secret agents was found out and executed in broad daylight.

A bitter-sweet story of a young sales assistant and a truck driver trapped between their dreams and the economic depression.

An election campaign becomes more interesting when anonymously published photographs depict the wife of a candidate, Dr. Peyrac, attending a sex party. Are the photographs fake or genuine ?

After her daughter is kidnapped, a mother discovers that there can be something even worse after "the worst."

The story of a woman that remained distracted for a long time from her life, from the passions that made her feel alive. The importance of true love is compared with the material value of diamonds. Only one truly lasts forever. She's got to find the thing that values most for her, the thing that gives psychical stability and real happiness again to her life.

A rock star-turned-bum, his vocal chords severed at the height of his career for the love of a woman, drunkenly roams the city, torn apart by sponsored race riots. When accused of murder, he may have the chance to get revenge on the magnate who maimed him.

The film Soleil Ô, shot over four years with a very low budget, tells the story of a black immigrant who makes his way to Paris in search of “his Gaul ancestors”. This manifesto denounces a new form of slavery: The immigrants desperately seek work, a place to live, but find themselves face to face with indifference, rejection, humiliation…until the final call for uprising. “Soleil Ô” is the title of a West Indian song that tells of the pain of the black people from Dahomey (now Benin) who were taken to the Caribbean as slaves.

Seven small rogues dream of stealing the beautiful jewels which are in Paris for an exhibition.

Louis Bourdin est employé à la RATP le jour, romancier la nuit, avec une forte prédilection pour le genre policier. Un jour, il rédige un polar situé dans l'univers de la RATP, boudé par les éditeurs. Le livre parvient alors aux yeux d'une bande de criminels...

After serving together in the French Foreign Legion, a mercenary and a doctor leave the service and go their separate ways. Later, they are reunited and become involved with a caper involving millions in a high-security safe. The two men become locked in during a holiday weekend as they attempt to crack the safe's combination.

Recovering from an attempted suicide, a man is selected to participate in a time travel experiment that has only been tested on mice. A malfunction in the experiment causes the man to experience moments from his past in a random order.

Based on the 2000 book of the same name by Emmanuel Carrère, it is inspired by the real-life story of Jean-Claude Romand. L'Adversaire's protagonist Jean-Marc Faure (Auteuil) pursues an imaginary career as a doctor of medicine in a plot more closely based on Romand's life and Carrère's book than was Laurent Cantet's 2001 film L'Emploi du Temps. The film was nominated for a Palme d'Or at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.

After a life of emotional and professional upsets, Alex finds himself headwaiter in a chic Parisian restaurant. Well into middle age, divorced but still very much a ladies’ man, he has one great ambition: to open an amusement park by the sea. One day, an old flame, Claire, suddenly re-enters his life. For Alex, the fires of love are easily re-kindled, but Claire has another man in her life…

Longtime friends Guarrigue and Sénanques own a successful law practice in Paris. The dreaded businessman Pervillard is one of their clients. One night, Sénanques, who is in an unhappy relationship, meets Sacha. For her sake, he causes a political scandal involving Pervillard and puts himself in danger.

The crew of an aircraft carrier discovers that it is being pursued by a UFO that turns out to be a radioactive probe from outer space. They appeal to the warring countries of Earth to stop fighting and help it to repel the invaders.

A semi-fictional account on the fatidic September 11, 1973, when the military commanded by General Pinochet took over the power from socialist president Salvador Allende, initiating a dictatorship that lasted until 1988 causing the deaths and disappearances of many people.

A romantic drama partially set in Amsterdam, this standard tale starts out in a mining area in Holland where conditions are about as rough as they get. Two of the miners, Italians Federico and Vincenzo take off together for the city's red-light district, where the women pose in windows for prospective customers. There the duo meet Else and Carrel who are willing to leave their windows to spend a weekend at a resort with the two men. Soon Else has fallen in love with Vincenzo and the future of the two hookers, as well as the miners, seems to look brighter.

"The Pocket Lover" tells the story of Julien, a 15 year-old boy who falls in love with an older woman, later discovered to be a prostitute. Now, Julien will have to face several obstacles, which includes his parents opposition with this affair, and Julien's own perceptions about the woman's line of work, going out with wealthy guys.

When Catherine is caught with her illicit lover by her father-in-law Paul, the concerned father leaves to tell his son Thomas about the incident. Paul is injured in an auto accident and returns home in a wheelchair unable to speak. Catherine's guilt weighs heavily on her as she hopes to never let Thomas know she was unfaithful. She panics and seeks a way to eliminate Paul in this psychological thriller.

An architect has an affair with a young woman who aspires to be a pop singer. She ends up pregnant but does not tell her lover about her condition as she contemplates having an abortion.

A young man whose father's fortune was stolen by his closest friends sets out to get revenge in this odyssey through the world's major financial centers.

Casti and Trébois, two friends who are workers at the same factory, have developed a common passion for flying. They dream of starting an aviation club. In the meantime they spend all their Sundays restoring an old plane under the supervision of Raf, a former RAF pilot...

Ticky Edriss, a dwarf, develops a scheme to avenge him on society and extort a bank.

A crackdown on drugs leads a burned out cop to take the law into his own hands and seek revenge against villainous drug dealers. Word comes down from above that the United States feels French authorities have been lax on their arrests of the dealers. A violent action feature finds the harried inspector battling his colleagues as much as the criminal element targeted for extermination.

Middle-aged businessman, Simon Léotard finds his future in jeopardy when his partner Julien commits suicide after having accumulated a mass of debts. Simon's unscrupulous business rival Lépidon offers to save him from bankruptcy by buying his company, at a discount rate. Reluctant to fall into Lépidon's trap, Simon decides to resolve the crisis himself. A prostitute, Mado, provides him with the solution to his problems...

Young Remi, a foundling, lives on the farm run by his impoverished foster parents. When their money runs out, unbeknown to his foster-mother, Rémi is sold by his hard-hearted foster father to an old street performer named Vitalis. Vitalis was once a famous opera singer, but became destitute after a tragic love affair.

Amidst a heated political climate, the opposition leader is killed in what appears to be a traffic accident. When a magistrate finds evidence of a government cover-up, witnesses start to get targeted. A thinly-fictionalized account of the events surrounding the assassination of Greek politician Grigoris Lambrakis in 1963, Z captures the outrage about the military junta that ruled Greece at the time.

"Popeye" Doyle travels to Marseilles to find Alain Charnier, the drug smuggler that eluded him in New York.

The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.

Beautiful young housewife Séverine Serizy cannot reconcile her masochistic fantasies with her everyday life alongside dutiful husband Pierre. When her lovestruck friend Henri mentions a secretive high-class brothel run by Madame Anais, Séverine begins to work there during the day under the name Belle de Jour. But when one of her clients grows possessive, she must try to go back to her normal life.

An insurance investigator is visiting Paris on assignment. He is soon made the object of a seduction bet amongst three ladies. Problems arise when the girls realize they are really falling for him.

Near the end of World War II, Gen. Dietrich von Choltitz receives orders to burn down Paris if it becomes clear the Allies are going to invade, or if he cannot maintain control of the city. After much contemplation Choltitz decides to ignore his orders, enraging the Germans and giving hope to various resistance factions that the city will be liberated. Choltitz, along with Swedish diplomat Raoul Nordling, helps a resistance leader organize his forces.

Marie, who was orphaned as a young girl, has a case of arrested development that makes her act younger than her age. One day she stops to look in a store window displaying various ornate dolls. Claude, the affluent, eccentric store owner, sees her and becomes infatuated which leads to her and him meeting and deciding to go and take a look at Claude personal doll collection at his house. Marie, unaware of Claude's bizarre obsession with dolls, decides to marry him.

A sexy model pretends to have a new boyfriend in a wacky plan to make her ex-lover jealous.

A man and his stepson driving across Europe are terrorized by a man following them in a pickup truck.