10 jours en or (2012)

Marc Bajau is a sock salesman. He is a womanizer, used to one-night conquests he forgets the next day. One morning, he wakes up with a mixed-race child in his arms, abandoned by the woman he had a fling with the night before: Lucas. The child hands him a piece of paper with just one address on it: 5 Rue du Puits, Gassin, on the Mediterranean coast. Unable to find the child’s mother, who turns out to be an undocumented immigrant facing deportation, Marc decides to take Lucas to that address, to Papa Clément’s. Along the way, he has to keep visiting his clients, while his boss harasses him at every opportunity. On his journey across France, he meets Julie, a hitchhiker who immediately dismisses him as a crude womanizer but gradually realizes that things may be more complicated and that he picks people up hitchhiking, and Pierre, a lonely old man who has reached the point of trying to end it all by swallowing toilet-bowl descaler and begs Marc to drive him to the seaside, where he is taking a mysterious package. The four of them, lost and stranded both literally and figuratively, end up in the middle of the birthday party of the farmer who gives them a hand. Each of the four separately realizes that these encounters have profoundly changed them and given them a renewed taste for life. When Marc arrives at Clément’s, he discovers that Clément is the priest of Gassin, not Lucas’s father. Marc learns that Lucas’s mother drowned while trying to reach England. He leaves Lucas and Clément, but ...