Jean-Pierre Kohut-Svelko

On a stormy night, off the coast of the Arcachon basin, a small sailboat named "Julie" disappears with a young girl of the same name on board. What really happened? The mystery is all the thicker because a month later, her husband met the same sad end. A year later, on the anniversary of Julie's disappearance, a commemorative meal is organized by the young woman's main relations. Many things from the past will then resurface.

In a routine look at what it means to finally leave adolescence behind — even in one’s mature years — this series of mood swings and sequences focuses on two grown men. Francois (Jean Francois Stevenin, the director) and Leo (Yves Alonso) are old friends, and at one point they decide to go out and search for one of their childhood buddies, the brunt of several of their practical jokes. In true form, the men opt for playing yet another practical joke on their friend, but their plans backfire when his wife Helene (Carole Bouquet) comes into the picture instead. Her presence forces them to reconsider their shenanigans in a new light.

After he's implicated in several murders, a real estate agent goes on the lam while his intrepid secretary does some private investigating of her own to locate the killer.

French Postcards rings both comic and true. The believable, fresh-faced characters are young naives from American colleges spending their French-English dictionaries, they compulsively seek out hundreds of monuments, romanticize the nomadic artist's life, and look for grown-up love. The French tutor them well, as befits their reputation. Jean Rochefort is the harassed headmaster with a hankering for affairs, and Marie-France Pisier is his very sexy wife. Watch for a newcomer named Debra Winger, and another-Mandy Patinkin.

A widower maintains a memorial room filled with his late wife's belongings. When fire destroys it, he transforms a chapel into a new shrine to preserve her memory.