The best Clément Hervieu-Léger’s movies

A seemingly ideal marriage is thrown into embarrassing turmoil in Patrice Chéreau's period drama, based on the short story The Return by Joseph Conrad.

Nathalie and Louise are friends from childhood. While studying drama at University Louise becomes hopelessly obsessed with her friend. Jealous of the male friends she has she breaks up the friendship, followed by a suicide attempt. Later, Louise marries, but finds time to see the, by now quite accomplished actress, Nathalie. They fight through the years, La Repetition following them as their friendship comes together and breaks up frequently, while never actually reaching anything that can be called a climax.

Earning a Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award in 1993, subsequently adapted for television and opera, "Angels in America" stages American society of the Reagan years, mixing intimate stories and political events, realism and the fantastical while following the dark narrative thread of the AIDS epidemic. This was the disease that, in 1986, ended the life of Roy Cohn, an unscrupulous lawyer who was a disciple of McCarthy, a homophobe, racist, “bully, coward and victim” as described on the Washington Memorial Quilt. Kushner makes him one of the twenty-three characters – played by eight actors – of his Gay Fantasia on National Themes divided into two parts: "Millennium Approaches" and "Perestroika". The setting is New York between 1985 and 1990. The Republicans are in power, the Chernobyl catastrophe is imminent, the collapse of the Berlin Wall is about to overturn cold war politics and HIV, still synonymous with certain death, is reduced to the definition of homosexual cancer.

Woman hero Dom Juan lives a life full of excesses and love affairs. When he seduces the nun Elvire, but shows no interest in her a short time later, he gets to deal with her vengeful brothers. Dom Juan and his assistant Sganarelle have to flee and set out on a journey full of strange encounters.

Le Petit-Maître corrigé is a three-act romantic comedy by French playwright Marivaux. It was first performed on November 6, 1734, by the Comédie-Française in Paris. In this production Clément Hervieu-Léger makes the eighteenth century resonate with our era, all the more so given that the language is “simpler than in other Marivaux plays, while still as refined, precise and full of humour”. The story is that of a young Parisian whose parents have found a good match for him, a count’s daughter. But when he goes to visit her in her country home, the handsome boy – whose Parisian manners are far removed from the rules of decorum that reign in the provinces – cannot open his heart to his lovely intended. Stung, the latter decides to punish his arrogance while a former lover arrives to prevent the marriage. Between the alliance of master and manservant, and the complicity of mistress and maid, a romantic intrigue ensues full of light-hearted conspiracies and feverish emotions.