Le bar des amants (1998)

Director Bruno Romy has put together a surreal, droll, and sometimes melancholy, sometimes risqué if not simply trashy series of seven vignettes on the love lives of several couples in a small village in Normandy in Northwest France. Romy has chosen former circus performers, mimes, and actors from street theater -- most of them in their first-time film roles -- to interpret these diverse and off-the-wall couples/couplings. One young mute woman finds her voice through a ventriloquist, another falls in love with a trapeze artist, and a village idiot finds a unique way to experience his first intimate sexual encounter.