Jacques Villeret

55 years ago, on October 1 1968, the first brand advertising spot appeared on the French television screen. Over the next three decades, thousands of creative little films would seduce and build our collective memory. Kitschy or cult spots, humor, slogans, music, stars, gimmicks, grand spectacle or sex appeal: during its golden age, how did advertising convince? Thierry Ardisson has brought together almost 400 advertising clips to relive the era of the conquest of minds and wallets.

Charismatic and resourceful, seducer and daredevil, Jean-Paul Belmondo has always played his roles as he lived, at a thousand miles an hour. He had only one passion: to entertain the public with his smile, his naturalness, his energy, his stunts. But contrary to appearances, his destiny was full of pitfalls. This film lifts the veil on a founding childhood that allowed him to overcome many obstacles throughout his life thanks to the tutelary figures of his father and mother. Told from the inside with the help of his autobiography, interviews and unpublished archives, this epic story traces the career of this turbulent young actor who launched the New Wave in Breathless before becoming the popular Bebel, an indestructible and provocative vigilante. From film to film, this documentary paints an intimate portrait of a man who built himself up to reach the top: his triumphs but also his trials, his doubts, his secrets, his angers, his clowning, his disappointments or his personal dramas.

In May 1974, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing became President of the Republic and wanted to bring about a new era of modernity. One of his first decisions was to break up the ORTF with the creation of three new television channels: TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3. Three new public channels but autonomous and competing. It is a race for the audience which is engaged then, and from now on the channels will make the war! This competition will give birth to a real golden age for television programs, with variety shows in the forefront. The stars of the song are going to invade the living rooms of the French for their biggest pleasure. This unedited documentary tells the story of the metamorphosis of this television of the early 1970s, between freedom of tone, scandals, political intrigues and programs that have become mythical.

Three former bank robbers are meeting after 25 years...

In 1917, the old rivalry between a prosecutor and a judge resurfaces during a police investigation into the murder of a child.

JAM (Christian Clavier), a French "master of the universe" is on the brink of a major takeover when he starts suffering from anxiety attacks. His doctor (Lhermite) thinks it is to do with childhood experiences and suggests he searches back in his mind to something that could be the trigger and will prove to be the antidote.

In Baghdad the Magnificent reigns Haroun al Plassid, who is the Caliph. There also dwells Iznogoud, who wants to be the Caliph. The irascible Grand Vizier hatches plot after plot to remove his ruler and take his place—melting Djinn, invisibility spell, cursed diamond, voodoo doll… But no amount of cunning or obstinacy can make up for sheer, hilariously bad luck.

1920. Jean Rezeau and his elder brother were living happily in their family estate in Brittany, until the death of their grandmother. The return of their mother, a worthy descendant of fairytales' witches, brings an all new atmosphere to their home.

A man leaves his 8-year old son with his father-in-law who lives near the glacier where the boy's mother died.

From his locksmith's shop, a simple guy dreams of becoming a crime boss, at the wheel of his Cadillac surrounded by blonde bimbos. He starts small, assassinating petty criminals. Gaining renown in the newspapers as "Le Furet" (The Ferret), he soon sets his sights higher. The police and organized crime both take up the chase.

Lucien, 14, can’t understand why his father, a serious and respected teacher, makes a fool of himself by dressing up as a clown and giving a show. André, Lucien’s father’s best friend, feels for the teenager and decides to reveal something from their mutual past that will explain the reason for Lucien’s father’s strange behavior.

Jean-Pierre (Jacques Villeret), un attaché humanitaire qui travaille au ministère des Affaires Etrangères, accepte de reconduire un jeune clandestin (Lorant Deutsch) dans son pays d'origine. Celui-ci appartient à la tribu des Hommes Gris d'Irghiz, réfugiés depuis la préhistoire dans une cité interdite du Haut Atlas.

In the 1980 French countryside, farmer Jojo and his ill-tempered wife Lulu hate each other, though their respective interests speak against divorce. The only thing that keeps the oppressed Jojo from murder is the threat of the guillotine...

A self-conscious and self-referential adventure into the (pretend) lives of legendary actors in Paris.

The film is set in Marais, a quiet region along the banks of Loire river in 1918. Riton is afflicted with a bad-tempered wife and three unruly children. Garris lives alone with his recollections of World War I trenches. Their daily life consists of seasonal work and visits from their two pals: Tane, the local train conductor and Amédée, a dreamer and voracious reader of classics.

A talking chimp, a jolly monk and a boxer on the run make an unlikely team in this French comedy for children. Brother Benoit, a French monk working with underprivileged youth in Mexico, one day finds a sick chimpanzee in need of water and medical attention. He brings the chimp back to his mission and nurses her back to health, naming her Mookie. A year later, Brother Benoit discovers Mookie can not only play basketball, but she can talk, the result of an exposure to radiation from a meteor crash. Primate experts from America are eager to get their hands on the little ape, but the Brother will allow no experiments to be performed on her. The Brother recruits Antoine, a boxer down on his luck, to help Mookie and the Brother flee to Mexico City, but when it turns out Antoine is wanted by the Mexican Mafia for not throwing a fight, all three must make tracks to insure their safety.

For Pierre Brochant and his friends, Wednesday is “Idiots' Day”. The idea is simple: each person has to bring along an idiot. The one who brings the most spectacular idiot wins the prize. Tonight, Brochant is ecstatic. He has found a gem. The ultimate idiot, “A world champion idiot!”. What Brochant doesn’t know is that Pignon is a real jinx, a past master in the art of bringing on catastrophes...

The story of Georges Mandel, an anti-Nazi French parliamentarian who refused to abdicate to the Vichy regime.

The adaptation of Molière's comedy-ballet in three acts.

Antoine a Union representative works in a financially troubled factory. He's not the sharpest tool in the box but he has a big heart and when he and his wife win the jackpot of the national lottery. Antoine will invest his gain to try and safe the factory.

An anthology movie comprising four weird stories. Like the Twilight Zone movie but strictly played for laughs. There’s a bit of everything, car explosions, french debauchery, serial-killers, crazy broads, silly humor and naughty language…

Probably no one in the public listening to the orchestra's rendition of Ravel's Bolero notices him but the drummer is a regular hero. For, although his mind is assailed by loads of unsettling thoughts and worries, he tries to keep the rhythm at any cost. He knows all too well that he falls out of time only once all the magic of the piece will vanish.

Tran and three of his friends flee Vietnam by swimming across the Mekong river. They take refuge in Thailand.

A tolerant veterinarian turns the other cheek when annoyed but changes his nature when he falls in love.

A successful playwright reflects on his journey from his Armenian roots to adapting in France, forty years after his family's move to Marseilles. He now goes by a new name to fit in better with French society.

A farce, Hoskins plays a photographer who specializes in religious pictures who searches for a model for Jesus. He does a favor for a friend and finds himself doing a voice track for a porno movie with Natasha Richardson. Hoskins finds his model for Jesus in Jeff Goldblum and a romantic triangle begins in which Goldblum finds adoring crowds believing him to be Jesus and then begins to believe it himself.

This series of sketches introduces doctor Apfelglück and four of his patients... and their rather peculiar and disturbing problems.

After the French defeat of 1870, Julia took three years to love Alexander, with whom she married for her fortune. Alas, when Julia wants to declare his love to her husband, the latter confesses to him that his passion is extinguished.

Martin Morel wants to spend Sylvester with both his wife and family and his girlfriend Agnes. So he asks his clumsy friend Bertin to pretend she'd be his wife. But the two can't stand each other... at first.

Adapation of the fanciful comic novel by Albert Cohen.

This film is made up several sketches in which certain actors play several real or fictional roles to a background of rock music. The lead character, played by Godard himself, is an annoyingly perfectionist film-maker determined to wring every last drop of the finest performance possible from his stars.

When he inherits the family house and property after his mother's death, aspiring novelist Fane returns home with his bimbo girlfriend Lilas. He must care for his idiot brother Mo and contend with a greedy garage owner who covets Fane's property to expand his business. When efforts to buy the property are fruitless, the mechanic incites the townsfolk against the strange trio.

In 1956, with the independence of Morocco, the Fedala conference in Tangier is set in a city of turmoil.

After he is dismissed from his umpteenth job, Momo is kicked out of the family home by his fed-up father. He immediately joins his buddy Manu, who is also penniless having just lost his job at a cafeteria. The two decide to ask shady nightclub owner Sammy for a job, and he promptly hires them to transport back two statuettes from Amsterdam. Momo and Manu soon find out that these art objects are stuffed with drugs, but still manage to carry out their mission. They receive one kilo of grass in exchange, which they sell immediately. But while the business is lucrative, they discover that it's not so easy to become a full-fledged drug dealer...

This is a charming and successful farce from director Thomas Gilou, featuring a witty screenplay co-authored by producer Monique Annaud. When a group of African squatters in Paris are threatened with eviction, they find themselves fighting against a bureaucracy that few French citizens understand, let alone immigrants. In desperation, they turn to their best option to resolve this dilemma: they call for a sorcerer from home. The sorcerer hops on a jet to Paris to cast spells on the entrenched bureaucrat, and while en route he strikes up a conversation with a fellow passenger, mentioning his job pays quite well. The interested passenger could stand to make a few extra francs, so he decides to take the sorcerer's place. Once he arrives, this imposter has to act like he knows what he is doing, and at the same time, he had better solve the eviction problem.

A small town in Algeria, in the years 1960-1962. Two young idle boys and rock fans, Boualem and Salah, try to survive in the turmoil of war, taking great care not to get involved.

In this conventional, broadly comic farce of greed and royal matrimony, nearly bankrupt businessman Victor Harris is marrying Maria-Helena, a princess who comes with a dowry that is made up of one half of her island kingdom. Her father, the cowardly King Arnold III is counting on the money this marriage will bring him. The country is now almost bankrupt because of the king's gambling debts. As Harris and the king look forward to their illusory profits from the royal merger, other characters add some liveliness to the otherwise predictable story.

Dressed as a clown, the clever rascal Grimm holds up the most secure bank of Montreal and takes 30 hostages. While confusing and ridiculing the police with his strange behavior, he calmly manages to rid the bank of a fortune. But then an unsatisfied companion arouses trouble...

For Véronique and Pierre, it's a strange Saturday: unusual encounters and unpredictable events follow one after another...

April 5, 1943: a battalion of the Foreign Legion arrives in El Ksour, Tunisia, to escort a fortune in gold bars to the home front. A German ambush awaits, and all but four die. Thanks to the street smarts of Sergeant Augagneur, the Legionnaires successfully counter attack. The bank manager and his seductive wife arrive, and so does a German lieutenant, whom the French arrest. Augagneur wants to steal the gold; warrant officer Mahuzard wants to do his duty. A series of alliances form and break apart, the group dwindles in number, and the gold heads south toward Betahoua. But in whose possession?

A woman involved with a terrorist group becomes dangerously close to the police officer guarding the bank they plan to rob.

After a tumultuous life, a middle-aged headwaiter in a Parisian restaurant dreams of opening a seaside amusement park. When an old flame reappears, he reignites his feelings, but she is involved with another man.

It is 1943 in Paris. Like so many others, the Bourbelle family's home has been taken over by the Germans and they now live in their cellar. Little do they know that the son, Guy-Hubert Bourdelle, is far from being the cowardly hairdresser he pretends. He is in truth the Germans’ most feared opponent: le super-résistant!

Inspector Leroux is investigating the owner of a contemporary art gallery Helen Duvernet who is suspected of being involved in trafficking of stolen paintings. He is both intrigued and attracted by the young woman, follows her everywhere and finally falls in love...

During a robbery that goes wrong, Valentin Tralande kills his accomplices and bank customers.

Danton and Robespierre were close friends and fought together in the French Revolution, but by 1793 Robespierre was France's ruler, determined to wipe out opposition with a series of mass executions that became known as the Reign of Terror. Danton, well known as a spokesman of the people, had been living in relative solitude in the French countryside, but he returned to Paris to challenge Robespierre's violent rule and call for the people to demand their rights. Robespierre, however, could not accept such a challenge, even from a friend and colleague, and he blocked out a plan for the capture and execution of Danton and his allies.

This tragic musical drama chronicles the star-crossed love between beloved French singer Edith Piaf and World Middleweight boxing champion Marcel Cerdan who died in a plane crash. The tumultuous affair is paralleled by the love affair of a French POW and his young pen pal who get engaged after writing to each other for four years and having never met. Their romances are framed by the sad, torchy songs of Piaf.

The plot in this story weaves around like a New Year's reveler at four in the morning, heading first in one direction and then in another, with the intention of going home if things would just stop moving. Bernard (Gerard Depardieu) is a doctor whose Hippocratic oath was a hypocritic failure -- the not-so-good doctor kills his wife because she is having an affair, and he kills her lover too. Then he joins the French Foreign Legion. On his way to the former French colonies in Africa, the plane he is in crashes, and Rossi, a "friend" on the plane with some overweight in carry-on money, shoots Bernard and takes off, leaving him for dead. He is nursed back to life and health by friendly villagers and just his luck, he not only manages to make his fortune in Africa, he also nabs a French passport from a dying man who will clearly not need it anymore unless the Pearly Gates have a French guard.

Two buddy farmers are visited by aliens who like their domestic cabbage soup.

The film follows four families, with different nationalities (French, German, Russian and American) but with the same passion for music, from the 1930s to the 1960s. The various story lines cross each other time and again in different places and times, with their own theme scores that evolve as time passes. The main event in the film is the Second World War, which throws the stories of the four musical families together and mixes their fates. Although all characters are fictional, many of them are loosely based on historical musical icons (Édith Piaf, Josephine Baker, Herbert von Karajan, Glenn Miller, Rudolf Nureyev, etc.) The Boléro dance sequence at the end brings all the threads together.

In southern France, in a quiet little town, the mayor, who also owns a castle with some cattle, is in the wine cellar with some other people: the pharmacist, the veterinary, and some of his employees. As they are drinking wine, they hear a terrible noise and the heat's getting higher and higher. They don't realize what's happening: when they come out of the cellar, they realize that everything has burned, and all the buildings are destroyed...

Rien ne va plus is a series of comedy sketches of disparate quality, on the social, cultural, and political foibles that make the French, French. Various settings and character types are given a once-over, including pseudo-intellectuals, punk bikers, right-wingers, and patrons of a low-end cafe.

Jacques does his military service. Shy, round and clumsy, he is forced to agree to be the driver of a special ambulance.

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.

The independently-minded daughter of lower-middle class French shopkeepers, Brigitte, one of three sisters, refused to marry the father of her child when she became pregnant. In this film, she reminisces about her family life beginning when she was about five years old, up to the present when she is in her early 20s. Of her two sisters, one has a nervous breakdown and the other one becomes something of a baby factory. Colorful anecdotes of her eventful life lend additional depth to her insights.

Serge (Stevenin) is a dweller in the French provinces who happens upon Georges (Jacques Villeret), a Parisian motorist in distress. Serge arranges for the car to be taken to a nearby garage. Georges' friends, who were with him in the car, have continued their journeys. Because of that, Serge takes Georges under his wings while he waits for his car to be repaired, and they tour the countryside and party with the local revelers. Nothing much is said between them, but it is clear that they have become friends

This sentimental drama is the story of the relationship between a lovely mother and her 20-year-old son who never really knew her. When he learns that she is dying of leukemia, he tries to get to know her. By the end of the film, the two have reconciled and she dies feeling at peace.

Robert #1 is played by Charles Denner, while Robert #2 is played by Jacques Villeret. Beyond their common name, the two Roberts are as different as night and day. Oh, there is one more resemblance: both Roberts are lonely, and both hope to meet suitable mates through a computer dating service. As they await the arrival of their new dates, Robert et Robert become fast friends. Of the three favorite film subjects of writer/director Claude Lelouch--romance, crime, and politics--Robert et Robert falls firmly into the first category.

An adaptation of the novel of the same name by Julien Gracq. Four soldiers await a possible German attack on a fortified house in the forest of the Ardennes.

Young Jeanne falls in love with photographer Francis, who soon takes her with him when he emigrates to America. In a small town in the still wild west, they build up a small photo shop. Meanwhile, animal doctor David lives on his lonesome farm together with his unlucky wife. It takes years and two tragic accidents until Jeanne and David meet. She has already decided to return to France as soon as possible, but love, and fate, have other plans.

Two adults play babies and wild antics ensue.

Jean-Arthur has been working as a clerk in a travel agency. One day, he, along with his colleague comes to a brilliant idea: what if I offer tourists real extreme recreation? So the group of tourists land on a deserted island with no food, no shelter, nothing.

Imprisoned as an accessory to murder, Catherine gives birth to a son she conceived in prison. Eighteen years later, her sentence served, she is reunited with the boy, Simon, who has remained in an orphanage the entire time. She is accompanied by toothsome prison buddy Sarah, and gradually these people whose lives have been frozen in time "thaw" and get on with the business of living.

The film follows the exploits of Jacques, a car-mechanic turned pro-thief, and his Jewish co-conspirator Simon as their robberies, beginning well before the Second World War, take on a political coloration under the occupation.

Georges Lajoie is a Parisian café owner. As every summer, Georges, his wife Ginette and grown-up son Léon go on holiday to Loulou's campsite, where they meet up with the Schumacher family (whose father is a bailiff) and the Colin family (who sells bras in the markets). This year, their peace is slightly disturbed by the proximity of a construction site where foreign workers are employed. Xenophobic comments are made. One evening at the ball, a fight breaks out between Lajoie, Albert Schumacher and two algerian immigrant workers...

Two men and a woman live quite happily together in a romantic liaison. The woman is probably wealthy anyway, so the trio doesn't worry much about money. One day they decide to take a trip in their beat-up car, managing the whole affair in their own special, insouciant manner. They are followed by a suspicious policeman who thinks there's something fishy about this group.

Monique is dying of cancer, lying in bed in the apartment above the store her family owns. Her philandering husband carries on with life, her son remains aloof, and her daughter-in-law wonders if she is witnessing her own decline. They all struggle to express, or feel, their love for one another.

Elizabeth and her daughter Cecile spend their holidays at a lakeside resort in the French mountains. Elizabeth falls in love with a strange Italian, Giovanni, while young Cecile is courted by an apprentice cook. It seems that mother and daughter are drifting apart from each other, but then their holidays are over.

In 1956, the professional army of France lacks the manpower to keep the peace in Algeria, the colony which the country is determined to hold on to at any price. For this reason, reservists are called up and subject to an intense period of training before being sent to the front. Rémy March, Alain Charpentier and Raymond Dax are three such young men who have no interest in the military escapade and are reluctant conscripts. What they witness in Algeria will appall and transform them. Rape, torture, executions... there is no end to the atrocities in which they become unwilling participants. No wonder the French military are so willing to proclaim that there is nothing to report...