Robert Guédiguian's Au fil d'Ariane (2014)

Au fil d'Ariane is initially described as 'une fantaisie'. Ariane (Ariane Ascaride) is preparing food on her birthday to get ready for the party, but although bunches of flowers arrive she keeps getting phone messages saying people – including her husband and children – won't be able to show up: in fact it looks like no one will. So she just decides to drive into town in her car: surely a crazy thing to do if she's drinking?

And then as she waits with others for the bridge to lower and the ship pass and everyone gets out of their cars and starts dancing to music someone's playing. She meets and gets talking to a motor-cyclist and goes off to a restaurant with him, but what happened to the car? At the restaurant she meets people such as Jack (Jacques Boudet) who pretends to be American, Marcial (Youssouf Djaoro) the souvenirs seller, and the owner Denis (Gérard Meylan), who's obssessed with Jean Ferrat.

But she seems to leave all too soon, and the taxi driver (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) takes her to the pound where her car's been put, but she can't pay to get her car back or pay the taxi driver as a thief comes along and takes her handbag. Out of reluctant charity the driver takes her back to the restaurant where the owner sets her on as a member of his staff. Marcial provides a boat for her to sleep in, and life is ecstatic: she loves talking to the restaurant tortoise, who even talks back to her in perfect French.

Then Ariane meets the taxi driver again, only he's turned into a suicidal actor – or is that part of the act? Certainly Ariane gets her wish to join in the act by singing on stage with the man with a rope round his neck, and the audience is so appreciative of her performance. And then she wakes up to see her husband (the taxi driver it seems) her children and all the other people we've seen in her dream.

This may not be one of Guédiguian's best films, but it's really refreshingly different from his others.