Sarah Duhamel

A couple’s fight over dinner leads to spiralling domestic abuse that spreads all over town. (MoMA)

Rosalie and Léontine go to the theater and are swept away by big emotions.

Wimpy Little Moritz needs to toughen up to win Rosalie, but ends up smashing everyone and everything in sight when boxing lessons turn him into a mindless fighting machine. (MoMA)

A robust housekeeper loses control of her new pet monkey, and it quickly trashes her middle-class employer’s home.

A jolly housekeeper brings new meaning to the notion of “home entertainment” with a handsome new portable phonograph that causes people, furniture, and buildings to rock and roll through the magic of stop-motion animation. (MoMA)

Little Moritz Runs Away With Rosalie

Maurice Schwartz and Sarah Duhamel meet at a party, and he falls instantly in love with her. She doesn't even notice him. He follows her and her escort home, and when she passes a note through her window to what she thinks is the other guy, Schwartz gets the note, and pursues the object of his affection.

Pétronille's husband jockey, Tortillard, face-plants in the middle of the track. She puts on his clothes and mount his steed, “despite her rotund build” at 100 kilos. She leads the other riders on an off-track equestrian escapade, eventually making it back to the course.

Anarchic physical destruction

When Patouillard meets another woman at a street cafe, his jealous wife dresses up as a man in a suit and beard to spy on him.

Léontine helps her pal Rosalie (Sarah Duhamel) race against time to clean up a house after Rosalie’s boss, Baron von Hummen, announces that he and Madame will return home earlier than planned. They recruit workers and poach resources from a nearby construction site. As we see, it takes a village to tidy a house on short notice (or at least it should!), but there’s a limit to the capacities of even collective domestic labor. Accelerated productivity gives way to sheer physical anarchy and irreversible destruction. Dirt and debris pervade every surface—furniture and skin alike—leading to several unfortunate blackening gags.

Pétronille, a maid, borrows one of her employer's dress to go out with her boyfriend Onésime but the outfit is ruined during the meeting.

Rosalie moves into an apartment building, disturbing her neighbors above, below, and next to her.

Rosalie is a maid for a wealthy family and receives a letter that her cousin is coming to visit. She assumes that a burglar is her cousin and the mix-up and chaos begins.

Pétronille tries and fails to commit suicide, multiple ways, after her boyfriend Casimir dumps her. A morbid but amusing comedy.

The wife of Patouillard begs him for new clothes according to the latest fashion in the newspapers. So they go out for some shopping. Afterwards she is going out in her new dress, which is so tight that she can hardly walk in it. She changes the skirt for a pair of trousers, but finds herself being laughed at, and when the trousers get wet at the seaside, Patouillard finally puts her in a jute bag and makes her hop back home.

Léontine goes on a dish-breaking rampage to protest her parents’ boring rules, so they kick her to the curb. She proceeds to terrorize the neighbors, tripping two men hauling large cartons by ensnaring them with pieces of string. She drops a pumpkin on a shopkeeper’s head, ties someone’s furniture to a moving vehicle, and then explodes fireworks inside a plumber’s protruding drainpipe. He puts out the flames in a tailspin by jumping into the river.

Léontine cannot resist her desire to sail her new toy boat indoors. She plugs up the drains and turns on the faucets, flooding the house as water rains down through the floorboards and collapses the ceilings.

Jane has been elected the president of the Union of Cooks and Housemaids, and has just signed a resolution to improve their working conditions. Returning to the bourgeois family for which she works, Jane flexes her new-found power.

Once Mme. Ducordon discovers the joys of a new fashionable dance, she starts performing it wherever she happens to be.

In a playful, reflexive take on the familiar “last-minute rescue” formula, a woman and her housekeeper left alone at home miss-read shadows projected from the street outside and fear a violent assault. Male police officers dispatched to rescue them correctly diagnose the situation, with hilarious results, including a late gender reveal. Notable for its early use of triptych.

Rosalie veut en finir avec la vie

Eva is dispossessed but everything magically returns to her.