Jean Rochefort

An obsessed scientist assembles a living being from parts of exhumed corpses.

In 1941, the world is radically different from the one we know from history books. Geopolitics has developed strangely: Napoleon V rules France and, for the last 70 years, scholars have been mysteriously disappearing, depriving mankind of their inventions. Without radio, television, electricity, aviation, and the combustion engine, the world is mired in outdated technology, dozing in the previous century's knowhow dominated by coal and steam. In this bizarre universe, Avril (Marion Cotillard), a teenage girl, Darwin (Philippe Katerine), her talking cat, Pops (Jean Rochefort), her grandfather, and Julius (Marc-André Grondin), a young scoundrel and police informer, go off in search of Avril's parents, two of the missing scientists. The quartet will face many dangers and mysteries in this strange new Rigged World.

Twelve-year-old Antoine falls profoundly in love with a voluptuous but suicidal hairdresser, a formative experience he never forgets. Much later in life, he seeks to repeat his romance by marrying Mathilde - also voluptuous and also a hairdresser - with whom he forms an intimate and consuming relationship in an attempt to blot out the miseries of this world from their lives.