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5 votes
A satirical examination of the transformation of a French investment bank into a Hollywood power broker, Le Sens des Affaires begins with a lowly bank clerk's embezzlement of $104 million francs (about $14 million dollars) to finance his screen adaptation of Chekhov's Three Sisters. The clerk, Gerard Dutillard, funnels bank funds into three fictional affiliates in a way that makes the bank's president, Jean-Francois de Roquemorel, legally responsible. Financial ruin seems a distinct possibility, but Dutillard has worked out a plan to make the system work in his favor, and soon enough his banking superiors are doing their best to salvage his film and make it marketable, prompting actual investors to fuel the production with cash.
Director
Writer
Status
Released
Original Language
FR

The whole intrigue is centered around carte-blanche documents kept in a vault. Whoever fills in the blank becomes the owner of a revue. Big money is involved. The nephew of the owner of the vault is trying to cheat his uncle and have his name in the documents. Everything is even more complicated because the manager of the bank has a finger in the pie, too. Who but a humble bank-teller (Pierre Richard) will ruin the scheme?

Dutillard
Paris, in the early 1960s. Jean-Louis Joubert is a serious but uptight stockbroker, married to Suzanne, a starchy class-conscious woman and father of two arrogant teenage boys, currently in a boarding school. The affluent man lives a steady yet boring life. At least until, due to fortuitous circumstances, Maria, the charming new maid at the service of Jean-Louis' family, makes him discover the servants' quarter on the sixth floor of the luxury building he owns and lives in. There live a crowd of lively Spanish maids who will help Jean-Louis to open to a new civilization and a new approach of life. In their company - and more precisely in the company of beautiful Maria - Jean-Louis will gradually become another man, a better man.