Jean-Louis and Anne have had their fling and separated. Now 20 years have passed. He is still dating various women. She is now a big time director who's most recent film was a very expensive bomb. She comes up with the idea of making a romance based upon her fling with Jean-Louis. She contacts him to gain his permission. Jean-Louis is still in racing and goes away for a desert rally while she begins filming. She finds the mood of their romance difficult to recapture in her film.
Françoise has gone into business seducing men whose wives want to divorce them, and who need incriminating evidence against them. In addition, she has a little blackmail operation going on on the side with politicians who can't afford a scandal. She got started on this business after she was raped, and hasn't looked back since. Now the police are on her trail, and she avails herself of the services of a couple who make a profession of hiding wanted criminals. At the hideout, she meets Simon, a second-generation mobster. As the police close in, Françoise and Simon go on the run together, pulling off occasional heists for operating money. Before long, they have also fallen in love.
On April 13, 2011, Les Films 13 production company turned 50. How can one celebrate an anniversary of this sort ? By simply making "another" film that would sum up all the earlier ones. D'un film à l'autre is hence a kind of anthology of the films produced Les Films 13 since the 1960s (short and feature films written and directed for the main part by Claude Lelouch), a best-of of half a century of cinema, going from Le Propre de l'homme to What Love May Bring. A biography in images of a filmmaker as admired as he is criticized. In reality, D'un film à l'autre is more than a series of film excerpts, interviews, and making-of documents (some of which possess an undeniable historical value, like that from A Man and A Woman, or the final performances of Patrick Dewaere).
The successful novelist Judith Ralitzer is interrogated in the police station about the disappearance of her ghost-writer. A serial-killer escapes from a prison in Paris. A missing school teacher leaves his wife and children. In the road, the annoying and stressed hairdresser Hughette is left in a gas station by her fiancé Paul while driving to the poor farm of her family in the country. A mysterious man offers a ride to her and she invites him to assume the identity of Paul during 24 hours to not disappoint her mother. Who might be the unknown man and what is real and what is fiction?
They knew each other long ago: a man and a woman whose dazzling and unexpected romance captured in the now-iconic film, revolutionized our understanding of love.
Today, the former race car driver seems lost in the pathways of his memory. In order to help him, his son seeks out the woman his father wasn’t able to cherish but whom he constantly revisits in his thoughts and dreams. Anne reunites with Jean-Louis and their story picks up where they left it…