Marseille. Heaps of flowers and funeral wreaths... "A man who no longer defends his colors is no longer a man."

Marie, who was orphaned as a young girl, has a case of arrested development that makes her act younger than her age. One day she stops to look in a store window displaying various ornate dolls. Claude, the affluent, eccentric store owner, sees her and becomes infatuated which leads to her and him meeting and deciding to go and take a look at Claude personal doll collection at his house. Marie, unaware of Claude's bizarre obsession with dolls, decides to marry him.

For young Parisian boy Antoine Doinel, life is one difficult situation after another. Surrounded by inconsiderate adults, including his neglectful parents, Antoine spends his days with his best friend, Rene, trying to plan for a better life. When one of their schemes goes awry, Antoine ends up in trouble with the law, leading to even more conflicts with unsympathetic authority figures.

Yves Tréguier, a young orphan, escapes from a reform school in Brittany to join "Dédé la Glace" in Paris, an old-timer with whom he has a sincere friendship. The love of Zette, a young girl he has met, and the benevolent friendship of Father Blain, the bistro owner, give him the desire for regular work. "Jo le Grec", a pimp jealous of Dédé's friendship with Yves, seduces Wanda, a prostitute he loves, and shoots Dédé dead. Blain prevents him from doing the same to Yves, and shoots him in turn. Yves can live an honest life with Zette and the baby she's expecting.

Adaptation for TV of the Dino Buzzati play "Un caso clinico". A modern Kafkaesque horror story in which medical specialists and machinery destroy a perfectly healthy man.

David Levinstein, a young Jewish boy whose parents have been arrested and killed by the Nazis, is taken in by Monsieur Ray, the head of his school. Unfortunately for him, Donnadieu, a pro-Nazi schoolmaster, denounces him to the Gestapo and he is sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp. After being released in 1945, David attempts to live normally. He even marries Jacky, the woman he has fallen in love with. But fifteen years pass and the taste of revenge invades him and becomes irresistible. He eventually traces the teacher who gave him way.

Paris, 1933. The daughter of a respectable lower middle class couple, Violette Nozière, leads a disreputable double life. Far from being the innocent 18-year-old her parents mistake her for, she spends her nights with dissolute young men in the less salubrious areas of the city.

After her daughter is kidnapped, a mother discovers that there can be something even worse after "the worst."

This Surrealist film, with a title referencing the Communist Manifesto, strings together short incidents based on the life of director Luis Buñuel. Presented as chance encounters, these loosely related, intersecting situations, all without a consistent protagonist, reach from the 19th century to the 1970s. Touching briefly on subjects such as execution, pedophilia, incest, and sex, the film features an array of characters, including a sick father and incompetent police officers.

A judge investigating police corruption finds that the deeper he digs, the more roadblocks he finds.