Hutton Buscel, un petit village du Yorkshire. Celia Teasdale, l'épouse du directeur de l'école, Toby, un insupportable ivrogne, savait-elle ce qu'elle faisait en renonçant à fumer la cigarette qui lui faisait envie, posée là, sur la table du jardin ? Son destin va s'en trouver modifié. Cinq secondes après avoir pris la décision de ne pas fumer cette cigarette, Miles Combes, le meilleur ami de Toby, fait son apparition. Grâce à cette rencontre, ils dîneront peut-être ensemble en tête à tête cinq jours plus tard. A chacun des menus hasards qui orientent le cours de leur existence, d'autres dénouements lient et délient les personnages, Celia et Toby, naturellement, mais aussi Miles, l'ami intime, Sylvie, la bonne, Lionel, le jardinier lubrique et Joséphine, la belle-mère envahissante...

1993 film by Alain Resnais

Business executive Odile seeks a new, larger apartment. Her younger sister Camille, having completed her doctoral thesis in history, is a Paris tour guide. Simon is a regular on Camille's tours as he's attracted to her. However, Camille has fallen for Marc, and they begin an affair. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, since he hopes to eventually have his family join him in Paris.

An upper middle-class French family celebrates a birthday in a restaurant. In one evening and during one meal, family history, tensions, collective and separate grudges, delights, and memories both clash and coalesce.

Jacques and Martine, an ordinary bourgeois couple, invite to dinner a friend whom they have not seen the last ten years. Since then he has become a media star and everything has to go just right at dinner.

Unpolished and ultra-pragmatic industrialist Jean-Jacques Castella reluctantly attends Racine's tragedy "Berenice" in order to see his niece play a bit part. He is taken with the play's strangely familiar-looking leading lady Clara Devaux. During the course of the show, Castella soon remembers that he once hired and then promptly fired the actress as an English language tutor. He immediately goes out and signs up for language lessons. Thinking that he is nothing but an ill-tempered philistine with bad taste, Clara rejects him until Castella charms her off her feet.

Agathe Villanova is a self-centered, workaholic feminist politician who, upon reluctantly returning to her home in the south of France to sort out her mother's affairs, runs for a local election. Upon her arrival, Agathe grudgingly agrees to take part in a documentary being made by the blundering duo of Karim, an aspiring filmmaker, and self-professed "reporter" Michel, on the subject of "successful women." As Agathe's life hilariously unravels, the camera is there to capture it all.