Monsieur Joseph

Under his real name of Youssef Hamoudi, Mr Joseph is a bookseller, and has lived in the same district of a small northern town for the last 45 years. Everyone knows him, he has plenty of friends and a well-established routine. Hardly surprising then, that Mr Joseph would never have imagined that a brief, seemingly commonplace expression dropped out one morning during a conversation could have such dramatic consequences. That night, his young wife Tina didn't come home, and to explain her absence, Mr Joseph came up with the idea of inventing a fictitious trip to Valenciennes. A little white lie, nothing more, yet suddenly the glances and stares became suspicious, silently probing and accusing him. A little white lie was all it took for him to become the stranger once again, the man everyone is suspicious of and who obviously has something to hide. And then of course there's that old unsolved case of the young woman whose body was found in the canal just a few months before he married Tina...


　　Directed by: Olivier Langlois, 2007


　　Screenplay: Jacques Santamaria, based on "Le petit homme d'Arkhangelsk" by Georges Simenon


　　With: Daniel Prévost (Mr Joseph), Julie-Marie Parmentier (Tina), Serge Riaboukine (Captain Boucheron), Catherine Davenier (Martine Palestri), Jean-François Gallotte (Julien), Eric Beauchamp (Pepito)


　　Genre: Drama


　　Awards: Prize for the best actor at the La Rochelle TV Drama Festival in 2007 (Daniel Prévost)