"Her Mother, the Whore" - After Coralie was found dead in a vacant lot, her mother Catherine - who thinks that her daughter was murdered - conducts her own investigation.
In 1973, the dictator Francisco Franco rules Spain with an iron hand, but is aging and the future of the regime is in question. Admiral Carrero Blanco is his natural successor, so the Basque terrorist organization ETA decides that he must die to prevent the continuity of the dictatorship.
Rémi is a man trapped in a deteriorating marriage. When his wife is unexpectedly killed in a car accident, Rémi is left with his stepdaughter, Marion, who chooses to stay with him rather than live with her birth father. After the initial shock passes, Rémi is caught off-guard when Marion begins expressing her attraction to him. Initially repulsed, Marion's mature beauty wears him down as he finally caves to her seductions.
Julien lives alone with his cat. He dreams of Marie, and a few minutes later, he sees her on the street and makes a date. He asks her to move in with him, and she does. Her boyfriend is dead, the rest of her past a mystery. Although they quickly seem to fall in love, she sometimes pulls away suddenly from Julien, is distant, and spends the night in a hotel. She also dreads something imminent and warns Julien that if he missteps, he will lose her and all memory of her. Julien responds by digging into her past: what explains her remodeling an upstairs garret room, her nightly dreams, her fears? What can Julien, now desperately in love, do when he learns why? Can either rescue the other?
Jenny (Isabelle Huppert) is a disconnected 16-year old schoolgirl who is so taken with a story of Native Americans coming to take someone into their tribe that she wanders out into the snow in search of them and dies. Was it an accident, or suicide? This drama explores the last week of Jenny's life in order to find out the answer.
On a stopover in Barcelona, Fériaud Roland discovers a corpse in the hotel room next door. He wakes up in a strange clinic without remembering who brought him there. The doctor insists he hallucinated, but it's not long before he obtains evidence that it wasn't a dream.
Jérôme Varenne, a French financier, lives and works in Shanghai with Chen-Li, his life and business partner. One day, during a short stay in Paris, while paying a call to his mother, he is very displeased to learn from her and his hated brother, that the family house in Ambray is going to be sold. Jerome decides to go to the town where he grew up to see what is going on. Little does he know how eventful his escapade will be. Little does he know that it will change his life from soup to nuts...
At the core of this docudrama are six French-speaking villages that were transferred to the jurisdiction of a Dutch-speaking province when political lines were drawn. The director of Le Grand Paysage d'Alexis Droeven (Jean-Jacques Andrien) was born and raised in this area and filmed scenes of the demonstrations that took place when the transfer occurred -- scenes that are used in the film. Additional background on the region emerges as the viewer sees that the economic policies dictated by the European Common Market intensify the cultural clashes in this zone because the policies often damage the earnings of the farming community -- and the farmers have no way to alter the ECM mandates. The film conveys a good sense of these issues that threaten the way of life of the small community, and at the same time, a mini-drama plays out against this backdrop.
In making this film about a director who is presently working on an autobiographical movie, real-life director Elie Chouraqui has played on a Jewish cultural theme (the "reel" director is Jewish) and the intermixing of 1960s movie-making techniques. In the film, director David is in his 30s and his autobiography brings in details about his growth to adulthood -- his early life along the seacoast in Normandy, his parents, his education, and in the present, his sister and her husband, and a few of his own lovers. Visions of the past enhance the events of the moment, such as in the scene of David's mother's death. In the end, viewers may be able to answer the question posed by the title -- "What makes David run?"