A country solicitor

This film tells the interwoven stories of four notarial situations in a notary's office in the Haute-Auvergne region of France. Through the narrative of two negotiated sales, an inventory, and an inheritance case, the notary's office becomes a realm of property and money matters, intimate conversations and secret exchanges—in short, the human comedy. The importance of dialogue and the highlighting of details such as gestures, attitudes, and glances reveal certain ways of thinking about our relationship to the world, particularly to death and money. The precise and meticulous approach to this notarial drama draws the viewer into a series of tableaux composed of several acts, in which the characters and their behavior seem to belong to another world, so close to and yet so far from our own, so different and yet so similar to us.