Absolument fabuleux (2001)

Patsy has a strong penchant for alcohol, especially a famous brand of champagne, while Eddie is obsessed with her curves and perpetually wired on cocaine, whose effects she calms with countless different sleeping pills. They took part in May ’68 together, but even on the barricades they were already somewhere they did not really belong. Now both in their fifties, these fiery feminists still say no to everything they believe degrades the weaker sex: cooking, living with a man, raising a child. But the feminism of May ’68 and the seventies is now little more than a vague nostalgia fading in their hazy minds. Eddie eventually married Alain and became the mother of Safrane, a beautiful young woman who has passed her baccalaureate exams. She later divorced, but still lives at her ex-husband’s expense and under the same roof. The only client left at her public relations agency is Chantal Goya, who is constantly being made a fool of. Patsy, for her part, preferred to remain single and independent, but spent her life as a kept muse, living off one man after another over the years. Both are true fashion victims, and their lives today are utterly dissolute, completely off the rails and resolutely eccentric, to the great dismay of Eddie’s family. Eddie and Patsy’s lives consist of champagne at every hour of the day and night, rooms filled with tobacco smoke, joints, cocaine, luxury clothes—and living parasitically through their association with stars of fashion and show business. Eddie wants to drag her daughter Safrane into the whirlwind of her “values,” light-years away from work and family life. But at 20, Safrane is still a virgin and is preparing for the entrance exam to École Polytechnique. Alain, who lives with a man, can no longer stand Eddie’s constant antics, alcoholism, grotesqueness and pathological irresponsibility; Eddie also literally takes over the house.