André Van Daele

She's a lawyer with a social conscience. He's a calculating industrialist who keeps many deals hidden from her. But when she discovers that her husband is involved in illegal arms traffic and is also having an affair with one of her colleagues, a direct confrontation ensues.

A factory worker is employed in the desolate, cold-storage cellars of a brewery. His spare time he devotes to collecting romantic images of wild flowers and sticking newspaper cuttings in an album, demonstrating a preference for more gruesome stories. Murders, rapes and acts of violence are the events which accompany his everyday existence and invest it with a tinge of color.

Hugo Claus rewrote and directed Friday as the cinematic version of his original 1969 play of the same name. Just as in the play, the story begins with the theme of incest, as the father Georges (Frank Aendenboom) returns from serving his jail sentence for that crime. Unlike the earlier play, however, the film does not emphasize that aspect of the story. When Georges gets home he finds out that his wife Jeanne (Kitty Courbois) has had an illegitimate child by a younger man, Erik (Herbert Flack), and now both of them must somehow try to return to a normal life, given their only too obvious lapses in moral judgment. As the husband and wife try hard to accommodate each other's failings and start to get to know each other again, Erik comes back into the picture. Now the three of them must resolve the deep-seated conflicts that brought them to this emotionally-wrought juncture of love and betrayal.

Leontientje, the Parisian niece of an East Flemish farming family, comes to stay. Aunt Zeunia is dying and has asked for her. Her visit completely disrupts life on the farm. The men fight for her attention, and the city girl is delighted by every bit of nature: 'Comme c'est beau!'. Her Parisian manners—two kisses for everyone—drive the farmer's wife up the wall: "All that fuss!" But the youngest farmer starts dreaming...