
An anthology of four comic moral tales about the hypocrisies surrounding sex in 1960s Italy: frothy young love and office politics in the big city; milk advertisements that begin to haunt an aging prude; a trophy wife enduring her husband's very public affairs; a lucky ticket-holder at a small town fair.

A police commissioner lives with his two children, wife, mother-in-law and maid. But he discovers that he has been poisoned with arsenic, and that the culprit must be someone close to him.

Handsome and rich Spanish gentleman abandons his wife and riches for his love of a young girl of poor stock who taunts and degrades him.

Pépito runs a gang of thugs with authority. He has a natural son, Gaston, a professor of literature in Aix-en-Provence, whom he has hardly ever seen. Gaston announces himself for Christmas, and Pépito decides to make him look good by moving into his headquarters: a château where the crooks will be able to exercise their talents as composers.

In her small village in Vendée, Ludvine, an orphan, is in love with Jean-Pierre, but he is jealously guarded by her woman employer. On the day of the "Fair of Women", a traditional event where young men can choose the girl they fancy, Jean-Pierre picks out Ludvine.

Italy, 1916. Oreste Jacovacci and Giovanni Busacca are called, as all the Italian youths, to serve the army in the WWI. They both try in every way to avoid serving the army.

Roger Laroque is now a rich man. He returns to France under the name of William Farnell. There, he discovers that on the one hand his wife has died of a broken heart and on the other that his daughter Suzanne is in love with Raymond de Noirville, the son of his former mistress. With the help of a few friends, Roger coldly prepares his revenge.

Dr. Antonio Mazzuolo obsessively fights against what he perceives as immorality in Rome, only to be driven mad by a seductive billboard of Anita Ekberg that haunts him with hallucinations.

Given up for dead three years ago in a plane crash in the Amazon rainforest, a young woman arrives in Paris to find her eminent ethnologist husband. She learns of his death in obscure circumstances, having remarried in the meantime. She sets out to unravel the mystery surrounding her husband's death.

A middle-aged stock actor goes to London to try the big time. After much frustration, he lands a job doing TV commercials, gaining wealth and recognition. He eventually gives it all up to return to stage work and keep his pride.


Genial, bumbling Monsieur Hulot loves his top-floor apartment in a grimy corner of the city, and cannot fathom why his sister's family has moved to the suburbs. Their house is an ultra-modern nightmare, which Hulot only visits for the sake of stealing away his rambunctious young nephew. Hulot's sister, however, wants to win him over to her new way of life, and conspires to set him up with a wife and job.

An Eskimo who has had little contact with white men goes to a trading post where he accidentally kills a missionary and finds himself being pursued by the police.

After finding and adopting a child, a man gets a job at an all-girls school which doesn't allow families. Once the girls find the baby, they become his forty little mothers. At the same time, the child's true mother searches for him.

A doctor, leading an agreed life of the provincial petty bourgeoisie, falls in love with a young woman. As their relationship deepens, he becomes violently jealous and blames her for her dating and friendships.

Burgundy 1728. Old count Antoine d'Eon is overjoyed. His daughter-in-law has finally given birth to a boy and he will at long last be able to transmit his inheritance to his son Pascal. At least this is what he thinks, for Pascal has concealed from his father the fact that his son was ... a daughter, his eighth daughter! Well, enough is enough and Geneviève has no other choice but become a boy first, then a soldier and even the special envoy of Louis XV, King of France, to Catherine II, the Czarina of Russia.

A lawyer heads out on the road in an attempt to find his daughter who has been missing for quite some time. To help him navigate the secret world his daughter lived within that he knows nothing about, he recruits the help of Irene a close friend of his daughter's. But Irene has plans of her own.

For his final film, Jacques Tati takes his camera to the circus, where the director himself serves as master of ceremonies. Though it features many spectacles, including clowns, jugglers, acrobats, contortionists, and more, Parade also focuses on the spectators, making this stripped-down work a testament to the communion between audience and entertainment.


Barnabé, an occasional flutist, goes to Mme Petit-Durand to organize her daughter's 20 years. But he is confused with the Count of Marengo whom Mme Petit-Durand wants to give as husband to her daughter, who has already made her choice.