Under option in Germany
Federico Peres, aka Rico, is a shy young man with a terrible stammer. The arrival in town of Jean-Pierre Bernier, maverick theater director in charge of staging The Merry Wives of Windsor turns Rico’s life up-side-down. Bernier was a close friend of his father and Edwige, the vineyard owner who is financing the project.
Rico becomes production assistant, in charge of feeding the theater company. Everyday he goes hunting for the wine that will satisfy the tastes of the technicians and actors, lovers and would-be-lovers.
At the age of twenty, for the duration of a summer, Rico thus finds out that wine frees speech. In the heat that submerges the village, he discovers love and intoxication, becoming the character of a play that is both tragic and pagan, and where a painful past eventually resurfaces.
Thanks to the rawness and poetry of Michel Quint’s language, Les Joyeuses is a joyful tale of initiation and an ode to life.
Michel Quint was born in 1949 in the North of France. He studied literature and theater and became a professor as well as a playwright, working in particular for France Culture radio, before he started writing noir novels. He was awarded the Prix de littérature policière for Billard à l’étage (Calmann-Lévy) in 1989, followed by the highly successful Effroyables jardins (éditions Joëlle Losfeld) in 2000.