Celebrating his 50-year career, director Claude Lelouch wanted to try something a little more daring and ambitious. So he gathered a veritable battalion of name actors in a provincial town in the Burgundy region. The result is a new film that playfully deconstructs narrative conventions while asking who among us has the moral right to sit in judgment of another? A jazz festival is swinging in the town of Beaune, but 12 men and 12 women have gathered for a different reason. A trial is taking place and they are here for the dispensation of justice, such as it is. Yet each of these judges, lawyers, or jurors--people from every walk of life--has a skeleton or two tucked in a closet: a billionaire who tries to seduce a tax inspector with a diamond necklace, an aging prostitute who confesses to a customer that he may play a role in the memoir she is writing, the real Johnny Hallyday who wants to press charges against a troublesome look-alike.
