The Beautiful Story

The film tells two eras side by side. In the present, the paths of Jesus, a Roma man, and Odona, a thief and confidence trickster, cross. Two thousand years earlier the same people, under other names, are living through something similar on the road to Jerusalem. Lelouch keeps winding the two lines around each other and finally brings them together in the same place. Claude Lelouch's French film runs three and a half hours and leans on image, music and coincidence far more than on plot. Béatrice Dalle, Gérard Lanvin and Vincent Lindon are in the cast. It is among Lelouch's most ambitious and most argued-over works: some take it for a great experiment, others find it scattered.