Monsieur

A rich banker, after losing the wife he loved, tries to end his life. Then he learns something from his former maid: she had not been faithful to him. That news puts the man on an entirely different road. He stages his own death and comes back under a new identity. Directed by Jean-Paul Le Chanois, the film has Jean Gabin in the lead, with Philippe Noiret and Mireille Darc in the cast. It is a comedy with the question of class underneath it: for the first time the man looks at his own circle from the outside, and he does not like what he sees. The film presents the suicide attempt neither as a solution nor as a joke; it is where the story starts, not where it ends. It comes out of the French comedy tradition of the sixties.