Plot
In 1850, on the isolated French island of Saint-Pierre, a murder shocks the natives. Two fishermen are arrested. One of them, Louis Ollivier, dies in custody. The other, Neel Auguste (Emir Kusturica), is sentenced to death by the guillotine. However the island is so small that it has neither a guillotine nor an executioner. While one is sent for, Auguste is placed under the supervision of army Captain (Daniel Auteuil).
While Auguste is under the captain's care, the wife of the captain, Madame La, (played by Juliette Binoche) takes an interest in the convict and begins to try to redeem him. Under her auspices, Auguste works hard and carries out a number of good deeds for the good of the community. The locals begin to see that he has changed, and Madame La begins a campaign to stop him from being executed. After a year of awaiting execution, Auguste has become a changed man.
When the guillotine finally arrives on the island, none of the islanders wants to be the one to trip the lever on the guillotine, thereby executing Auguste. However, Auguste remains a condemned man and someone must be found to pull the lever on the guillotine. A newcomer arrives on the island who desperately needs money for his family. He agrees to become the executioner for money and housing, but also takes on the social stigma of being the community's executioner. The guillotine arrives and the townspeople are reluctant to help get it to shore, but once they see Neel helping to provide money for his family the others take shifts, too. The Captain refuses to take Neel to his execution and because of this is deemed treasonous and sentenced to death by firing squad. Both of the executions take place and Madame La is shown alone and in mourning.
Read more about this topic: The Widow Of Saint-Pierre
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“The westward march has stopped, upon the final plains of the Pacific; and now the plot thickens ... with the change, the pause, the settlement, our people draw into closer groups, stand face to face, to know each other and be known.”
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“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)