Nathalie Besancon Movies

A troubled and emotionally fragile woman finds herself at the center of a firestorm, in this gut-wrenching psychological drama from France. Screen veteran Isabelle Adjani (Les Soeurs Brontë, Ishtar) stars as Sonia Bergerac, an instructor at a school for "difficult" children. As if that role were not demanding enough, Sonia's husband suddenly and inexplicably leaves her, and she encounters considerable problems adjusting to her work environment. She thus finds herself careening toward a nervous breakdown, with seemingly no way to stop. Compounding matters is Sonia's decision to buck the principal's rule of no skirts for female teachers, a policy she resents. Sonia's world explodes into chaos one afternoon when she discovers a gun in one of her students' bags. Acting spontaneously and indignantly, she seizes it and fires an accidental shot, wounding one pupil's leg. The incident gets misread and draws untoward attention, and before long parents, politicians, law officers and the media surround the school and turn an unfortunate incident into a full-blown hostage crisis that may well push Sonia over the edge of sanity. ~ Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

After a series of short films, writer/director Laurent Firode made his feature-length debut with this tale of coincidence, chance, and fate inspired by a variation of the chaos theory, which supposes that if a butterfly beats its wings in one part of the world, it could theoretically cause a full-fledged storm thousands of miles away. Firode applies this theory to a disparate group of Parisians, opening with a young retail worker, Irene (Audrey Tautou), reading her horoscope on the train to work one morning. At the store, Irene has to deal with an elderly woman (Francoise Bertin) who wants to return a broken coffeemaker; as if that weren't enough, the dissatisfied octogenarian consumer has to put up with her impudent grandson, Luc (Eric Feldman). Amidst all the seemingly unrelated human activities in the film, cockroaches, bird droppings, and changes in the weather all conspire to bring the characters together -- or drive them apart, as the case may be. ~ Michael Hastings, All Movie Guide

The emotional dilemmas of two sisters and their families sets the stage for the French drama Plus Qu'hier Moins Que Demain. Francoise (Laetitia Legrix) is a teenager who has grown tired of her hometown and her parents, while her older sister Sonia (Mireille Roussel) has come back home, with husband and child in tow. Sonia's unresolved issues with her family, including a relationship with her uncle that ended badly, trigger bouts of depression that previously led to a suicide attempt. Francoise, on the other hand, has fallen in love with her cousin Bernard (Pascal Cervo), whose father is the man who once loved Sonia and betrayed her father. Plus Qu'hier Moins Que Demain was shown at the 1999 Rotterdam Film Festival, where it won the Tiger Award in the New Director competition. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide