Je vais craquer!!! (1980)

Jérôme Ozendron (Christian Clavier), in his thirties, is a young executive with a promising career, married to Brigitte (Nathalie Baye), with whom he has three children. One day, he runs into Chris, an old friend, and they spend the evening together. Chris is a playboy who moves in fashionable circles, going to places like Chez Castel and Chez Régine and mixing with pretty girls—something that greatly impresses Jérôme. A few days later, Jérôme is abruptly fired from his company. Instead of being dismayed, he wants to make the most of his free time to escape his “narrow life” and take up again the novel he abandoned long ago. So he leaves the marital home for a small attic room in the Latin Quarter, supposedly to be “in peace and quiet, to write,” but above all to enjoy the fashionable scene himself, in Chris’s company. He begins an affair with Natacha, a call girl, and with Liliane (Anémone), a desperate, very clingy young woman he met at a street performance. Completely swept up by his fashionable new acquaintances, who dangle the prospect of writing a screenplay for the cinema before him, Jérôme eventually abandons his wife and children—but ends up recreating with Liliane the petit-bourgeois life he had intended to escape, while Brigitte, his ex-wife, has meanwhile climbed the social ladder far higher than he has. The tables are turned on the one who thought he had the upper hand.