Prof. Henri Laborit uses the stories of the lives of three people to discuss behaviorist theories of survival, combat, rewards and punishment, and anxiety. René is a technical manager at a textile factory and must face the anxiety caused by corporate downsizing. Janine is a self-educated actress/stylist who learns that the wife of her lover is dying and must decide to let them reunite. Jean is a controversial career-climbing writer/politician at a crossroads in life.
Nicole, nurse in Grenoble, is raped one night by four men. Deeply scarred, emotionally and physically, she thinks she will never recover from the trauma. Following a friend's advice, she decides to file a lawsuit.
A story about two couples, longtime friends in which both husbands engage in long-term affairs and, as the title says, ultimately one remains with his wife and one makes a new life with another woman.
Jean-Pierre is a brilliant surgeon. The problems of his nearest and dearest don't interest him. But when he discovers that he too has a serious heart disease which needs operating on, Jean-Pierre finds out what it is to be a patient.
Camille was only sixteen and still in high school when she fell in love with Eric, another student. They later married and a child and were happy for a while. But now twenty-five years have passed and Eric leaves her for a younger woman. Bitter and desperate Camille drinks so much liquor at a New Year Eve's party that she falls into an ethylic coma and she finds herself... propelled into her own past! Camille is sixteen again when she wakes up this morning, her parents are not dead anymore and she must go to school, where she will meet her schoolmates and, of course, Eric. Is she going to fall for him again and... be miserable twenty-five years later? Or will she avoid him with the result never having her beloved daughter? Who ever said that time traveling was fun?
Two couple of friends, one very rich the other almost homeless, decides to go on Holiday. Julie, a single mother, joins them too. Once at seaside, it starts a complicate love cross among them that will involve also a transsexual, a jealous brother,a Latin Lover and another nervous stressed couple. Not to mention about the daughter of one of them that is secretly in Chicago with one of his father's employee... More, at the end of the summer all of them will join the same party...
Marc, in his 40s, is a professor of literature at the University of Lausanne. Still a bachelor — and still living with his sister Marianne in a huge, isolated chalet that they inherited when they were very young — he carries on one love affair after another with his students. Winter has almost ended when one of his most brilliant students, Barbara, suddenly disappears. Two days later, Marc meets Barbara’s mother, Anna, who wants to find out more about her vanished daughter.