A young woman is searching, today, in Paris, the collection of paintings stolen from her Jewish family during WWII.
There is nothing we can do against the call of love. Amiens, 1713. Des Grieux is a noble young student, wise for his years, who's preparing to become a knight of the Order of Malta. With a fine future as a teacher of rhetoric ahead of him, he meets a young commoner, Manon Lescaut, a candle maker's daughter. It's love at first sight.
In Lyon, where many are unemployed, Marie is a prostitute who loves her work: she's thoughtful and exuberant toward clients old and young, slim or flabby. One night, a homeless man sleeps in the foyer of her apartment house; she gives him a hot meal, then a place on the floor to sleep by her radiator, then she offers herself. She falls in love, giving him new life, clothes, a place to live. When he grouses that he must bar hop while she uses the flat for her work, she finds them a larger flat. He grows restless, seducing a manicurist and pressing her to prostitution. He's arrested for procuring, so Marie must decide what to do; he, too, must face the consequences of his choices.
Postwar France was slow to recover from the after-effects of the World War Two. The economy was doing poorly, and many people were poor and homeless, sleeping under bridges, etc. The winter of 1953-54 proved particularly difficult for these people, as it was one of the coldest on record. Father Pierre (Lambert Wilson), a parish priest, on seeing the suffering of these people (and their frequent death from the cold), was moved to write the French government seeking help for them. When his letter, which was published in the newspapers, succeeded in rousing overwhelming popular support for helping the homeless, he was able to form a charitable group (still active today) titled "Les Chiffoniers d'Emmaus," or "The Ragpickers of Emmaus" to channel help to them. This biographical film tells the true story of Abbe Pierre's successful efforts in those years.
Robert Hirsch (26 July 1925 – 16 November 2017) was a French actor. He was a sociétaire of the Comédie-Française since 1952. In 1990, he won César Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his role in Hiver 54, l'abbé Pierre. His other film appearances included The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and in 2006/07 he appeared in Le gardien (a French adaptation of Harold Pinter's The Caretaker) at Théâtre de l'Oeuvre then Théâtre de Paris. In April 2011, he asked Florian Zeller to write a part specially for him. The result was Le Père which had its first performance in Le Théâtre Hébertot, Paris, in September 2012. Hirsch played the central character, André, at the age of 87. Source: Article "Robert Hirsch (actor)" from Wikipedia in English, licensed under CC-BY-SA 3.0.
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