Josiane Balasko
Josiane Balasko (born 15 April 1950) is a French actress, writer and director. She was born Josiane Balašković in Paris. One of Balasko's most recognized roles among English speakers is as a lesbian in 1995's Gazon maudit (French Twist). She won the 1996 César Award (shared... Read full bio →
Featured Characters
Roles you can spot in Whatthemovie snapshots
Quand vient l'automne
Michelle, a retiree in Burgundy, expects her grandson Lucas but a mistake ruins her plans. Her friend Marie-Claude's son is released from prison, reviving Michelle's purpose.
Un tour chez ma fille
While her apartment is being renovated, Jacqueline is thrilled to be forced into spending "a few days" with her eldest daughter Carole and her son-in-law, who are both in couples therapy. These "few days" turn into "a few months". Jacqueline quickly feels at home. She prepares dinners, monopolizes the television, reorganizes the kitchen...
Tralala
Tralala, a 48-year-old singer-composer, is an homeless in Paris. One evening, he believes he's meeting the Blessed Virgin who says to him before disappearing : "Above all, do not be yourself".
La pièce rapportée
Paul Château-Têtard, a 45-year-old bachelor from the best of Parisian nobility, has – for the first time in his life – to take the Metro, and even buy a ticket. It is with extraordinary luck that the beautiful young Ava happens to be sitting at the counter: a spark ignites and wedding bells begin ringing in the distance.
L'intervention
February 1976. Somalian rebels hijack a school bus carrying 21 French children and their teacher in Djibouti City. When the terrorists drive it to a no-man’s-land on the border between Somalia and French territory, the French Government sends out a newly formed elite squad to rescue the hostages.
Neuilly sa mère, sa mère!
In 2008, Sami Benboudaoud discovered the hell of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Ten years later, now that everything is for the best for Sami who brilliantly completes his studies of political science, nothing will go for his cousin Charles of Chazelle.
Grâce à Dieu
Alexandre lives in Lyon with his wife and children. One day, he discovered by chance that the priest who abused him to scouts always officiates with children. He then starts a fight, quickly joined by François and Emmanuel, also victims of the priest, to "release their word" on what they suffered.
Un beau soleil intérieur
Isabelle, Parisian artist, divorced mother, is looking for love, true love, at last.
Les nouvelles aventures de Cendrillon
It's Julie's birthday but she seems to be the only one who remembers... Until Marco, the man she secretly loves, calls her and tells her he's going to drop off her son because the babysitter had a setback. Julie is devastated, everyone considers her to be a maid.
Retour chez ma mère
At 40, Stephanie loses her job and is forced to move back in with her mother. She is welcomed with open arms to the joys of overheated apartment, Francis Cabrel playing on loop, Scrabble games and precious motherly advice on how to behave at the table and live her life.
Joséphine s'arrondit
At last, Josephine has found her perfect non-smoker-cat-loving-amazing-cook-perfect-man-soulmate. They’ve been in love for two years and everything is peachy. Until she realizes she’s… pregnant.
Arrête ton cinéma!
Sybille, an accomplished actress, is given the chance to direct a film based on her own screenplay. Everything seems to go well at first. Her producers, two sisters, are two wacky but lovable characters, and Sybille dives into the adventure with them, putting aside her family life.
Le grand partage
An unusually cold winter forces the french government to push the best housed people to accommodate some poor fellow citizens. The decree called "Le Grand Partage" creates some trouble among the residents of a Paris upscale apartment block.
Tante Hilda!
Centers on an eccentric aunt who is everything to everyone.
Un heureux événement
She drove me into a corner, then forced me to go beyond my limits. She made me confront the absolute: love, sacrifice, tenderness, abandonment. She dislocated me, transformed me. Why didn't anyone warn me? Why doesn't anyone ever talk about this?" Un heureux événement, or an intimate view of motherhood, sincere and with no taboos.
Sport de filles
This microcosm of power and money has no time for Gracieuse, whose only assets are her talent, her fiercely stubborn character, and, most particularly, her determination to succeed.
Holiday
After a crazy and tumultuous night embellished with singular encounters, Michel's awakening is brutal and painful. Not only does he find himself accused of murder, but his wife cannot be found.
Neuilly sa mère!
Sami Benboudaoud, 14 ans, vit heureux avec ses potes dans sa cité de Châlon. Hélas, le destin l'arrache un jour à son paradis, et le propulse dans l'enfer de ... Neuilly-sur-Seine !
Le hérisson
Paloma is a serious and highly articulate but deeply bored 11-year-old who has decided to kill herself on her 12th birthday. Fascinated by art and philosophy, she questions and documents her life and immediate circle, drawing trenchant and often hilarious observations on the world around her.
Bancs publics (Versailles rive droite)
As she does every morning, Lucie takes advantage of her journey to work to lose herself for a while in the pages of a good book. And as she does every morning, she joins her colleagues at the office with a smile. It's a working day just like any other. Then suddenly all activity in the office stops.
Musée haut, musée bas
A curator terrified of green plants, a ballet of Virgin Saints, a minister of Culture lost in an exhibition of sex organs, a car that has disappeared in the Rembrandt car park, visitors in love with the Impressionists, Gilbert and George, Picasso, Gauguin and Warhol - all are connected with an art museum.
Cliente
A married construction worker leads a double life as a male prostitute serving rich ladies.
La clef
One morning, Eric Vincent, a thirty-something without a past and reluctant about fatherhood, receives a phone call from a stranger proposing him to retrieve the ashes of his late father, whom he never met.
L'auberge rouge
A group of travelers, including a monk, stay in a lonely inn in the mountains. The host confesses the monk his habit of serving poisoned soup to the guests, to rob their possessions and to bury them in the backyard. The story unfolds as the monk tries to save the guest's lives without violating the holy secrecy of the confession.
Les bronzés 3: amis pour la vie
After the Club Med and skiing, what happened to the Bronzés 27 years later? Early response: the same, and worse.
J'ai vu tuer Ben Barka
My name is Georges Figon. Okay I'm dead but, being the talkative kind, death isn't going to stop me from speaking. Yes, I'm a shady individual. Sure I have links with the underworld and other dark forces. But luring Ben Barka, the Moroccan opposition leader, into a trap was mainly an opportunity for me to become a great movie producer.
Cette femme-là
A strange investigation doesn’t erase the regrets of a grieving woman cop. Every four years, the past catches up with her. Every four years this woman is very afraid. Her fear is such that she feels it could kill her because in her dreams reality begins.
Le raid
Sami, Tacchini, Yaya and Kader are four small-time crooks from the suburbs of Paris. After a failed robbery, their boss, Carlito, sends them to Canada to spy on his fiancée. There, they are mistaken for a band of professional killers and are hired to assassinate the heiress Léonore de Segonzac...
Un crime au paradis
In the 1980 French countryside, farmer Jojo and his ill-tempered wife Lulu hate each other, though their respective interests speak against divorce. The only thing that keeps the oppressed Jojo from murder is the threat of the guillotine...
Absolument fabuleux
Patsy has a penchant for alcohol, especially for a famous brand of champagne. Eddie is obsessed with her curves and perpetually electrified by cocaine, soothed by countless different sleeping pills.
Les acteurs
Les Acteurs is the absurd story of Jean-Pierre Marielle desperately waiting for a cup of hot water, the story of a conspiracy against actors, the story of aging actors whose careers are slowly less active than they used to be, but a stunning tribute to French actors and their cinema.
Le libertin
The 'philosopher' (modernist intellectual of the French 18th-century Enlightenment) Denis Diderot is part of an aristocratic circle which practices the libertarian principles on the rural castle estate of the baron of Holbach, and prints their forbidden publication, the Encyclopédie, drowning the noise of the presses in Jewish assistant…
Chicken Run
Having been hopelessly repressed and facing eventual certain death at the chicken farm where they are held, Rocky the rooster and Ginger the chicken decide to rebel against the evil Mr. and Mrs. Tweedy, the farm's owners. Rocky and Ginger lead their fellow chickens in a great escape from the murderous farmers and their farm of doom.
Didier
Jean-Pierre Costa is a football manager upon whom fate appears not to be smiling. First, a friend, Annabelle, dumps a pet Labrador named Didier on him whilst she goes off to make a report in Los Angeles. Next, one of his star players is injured, leaving him one player short for a crucial match.
Gazon Maudit
After learning of her husband's infidelities, a housewife invites an itinerant lesbian to move in with them. None of their lives will ever be the same again.
Grosse fatigue
Stressed and overworked, famous French movie star Michel Blanc is beginning to wear down, physically and mentally, from the pressure and demands of fame. Already in a fragile state of mind, strange events start to transpire all around him, and he gradually loses his grip.
Tout le monde n'a pas eu la chance d'avoir des parents communistes
Irène, a strong french believer of communist utopia, is the happiest one when the Red Army Chorus announce they are coming to the Parisian stage.
Ma vie est un enfer
La naïve et complexée Leah signe par erreur un pacte avec le diable Abargadon. Mais elle est sur les listes du Paradis, aussi l'Archange Gabriel intervientil pour causer la perte du démon. Mais Leah commence à trouver Abargadon séduisant et pas si mauvais que ça. Elle décide de sauver son âme...
Les secrets professionnels du Dr Apfelglück
spendid's actors great movie
Trop belle pour toi
L'histoire d'un homme qui a epousé une femme qui a l'air d'etre sa maitresse et qui tombe amoureux d'une maitresse qui a l'air d'etre sa femme.
Une nuit à l'Assemblée Nationale
The leader of a nudist colony enlists the help of left-wing militant when he mistakenly believes he should receive the Legion of Honor.
Sans peur et sans reproche
Without fear and beyond reproach: the life of the brave knight de Bayard reviewed and corrected with humorous sauce.
Nuit d'Ivresse
Jacques Belin, presenter of a silly TV show, gets drunk after receiving an award and misses the train bringing his TV-soap-star fiancée.
P'tit con
An adolescent who fancies himself a sexy and conscientious young man abuses all his friends and family in a quest for his own independence.
La vengeance du serpent à plumes
An international intrigue with terrorists threatening to blow up the presidents of the most powerful countries.
La smala
When the mother of a "tribe" of five children leaves for good, their inept father is not sure how to keep the family clothed and fed, and without the help of his neighbor Simone, he would be nowhere. She is attracted to him but eventually gives up on the relationship.
Papy fait de la résistance
It is 1943 in Paris. Like so many others, the Bourbelle family's home has been taken over by the Germans and they now live in their cellar. Little do they know that the son, Guy-Hubert Bourdelle, is far from being the cowardly hairdresser he pretends. He is in truth the Germans’ most feared opponent: le super-résistant!
Le père Noël est une ordure
La permanence parisienne SOS détresse-amitié est perturbée le soir de Noël par l'arrivée de personnage marginaux farfelus qui provoquent des catastrophes en chaîne.
Le maître d'école
After having lost his job for having saved a child accused of shop lifting, Frédéric Barbier decides to become a school teacher with some funny results.The great comedy actor Coluche is excellent as a simple school teacher.
Hôtel des Amériques
Helene, a pill-addicted anesthesiologist, is mourning the death of her boyfriend when, through a car accident she causes, she chances to meet the lethargic Gilles, a young man who lives for free at his mother's hotel. Gilles pursues Helene romantically, and she eventually softens up.
Clara et les Chics Types
Three days in the lives of six friends who are nearly 30 years old, live in Grenoble, and have a rock band called the "Why Notes?". They're to play in Paris at Charles's school reunion.
Les bronzés font du ski
In this sequel to Les Bronzes (1978) summer has passed, but that doesn't mean the fun has to end for Bernard, Nathalie, Gigi, Jerome, Popeye, Jean-Claude, and Christiane.
Les bronzés
Holidaymakers arriving in a Club Med camp on the Ivory Coast are determined to forget their everyday problems and emotional disappointments. Games, competitions, outings, bathing and sunburn accompany a continual succession of casual affairs.
Nous irons tous au paradis
Sequel to Pardon Mon Affaire. Four men continue to explore the fallout from their personal lives. This time they buy a house in the country, but struggle to escape their troubles.
L'animal
The funny misadventures of a dating duo of movie stunt professionals in France.
Herbie Goes to Monte Carlo
Herbie, the Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of its own, is racing in the Monte Carlo Rally. But thieves have hidden a cache of stolen diamonds in Herbie's gas tank, and are now trying to get them back.
Dites-lui que je l'aime
Industrious accountant David Martinaud claims to be visiting his parents every weekend, but it's merely a cover for the labor-intensive refurbishing of his country cottage. The reason for David's secrecy is that his childhood crush, Lise, lives nearby, and, although she's married, he still believes they'll get together.
Le locataire
A quiet and inconspicuous man (Trelkovsky) rents an apartment in France where the previous tenant committed suicide, and begins to suspect his landlord and neighbors are trying to subtly change him into the last tenant so that he too will kill himself.
L'an 01
The film narrates a utopian abandonment, consensual and festive of the market economy and high productivity. The population decides on a number of resolutions beginning with "We stop everything" and the second "After a total downtime will be revived-reluctantly-that the services and products including lack will prove intolerable.