As the film opens, three young men were having a good time after watching a football game, drinking, fooling around at a car park just as they were preparing to leave. One of them, Franck (Reda Kateb) deliberately stood in front of the car driven by his buddy Al (.Raphaël Personnaz) and dared Al to knock him down. Al accelerated a bit to try to scare him off. He jumped on to the car's bonnet and grabbed his hand on the side of the car and challenged Al to do his best to throw him off. Al accelerated and swerved the car around a number of times. Franck fell upon the ground, motionless. His two companions got alarmed. When they bent over to see how he was doing, thinking he passed out, he gave them a big shock by suddenly shouting some abuses. They laughed and drove home. We next see Al, a top notch car salesman who rose from the ranks and who was all set tp marry with Marion Testard (Adèle Haenel) within 10 days being offered a 25% stake in the garage business run by his future father in law and boss Testard( Jean-Pierre Malo) with certain conditions. He went to celebrate with his two buddies at the garage and whilst fighting to look at a picture of the new girl friend of Franck on his mobile knocked down a man. Al got down, looked at the pool of blood around the man's head, panicked, and urged by his buddies to get away, hesitated for a moment, then got back into the car and drove off.
Life was never the same again. Al could never get the off the image of the man from his mind. He saw in the newspaper a picture of the man and went to the hospital to see how the man was doing. There he met Juliette (Clotilde Hesme), a medical student who had a relationship with a university philosophy lecturer and had just discovered that she was pregnant, saw the accident and who took it upon herself to help the victim but they did not introduce themselves. Earlier, she learned that the man was an illegal immigrant from Moldavia and traced his wife Vera (Arta Dobroshi) and called her from a number she discovered from the hospital records which the hospital staff did not yet have the time to call. Juliette suspected that the Al was involved in the accident, followed him and got down his car license number and then went to the garage to confront him. Al denied and said that he did not know what she was talking about. He could not because that would mean that he would be sent to jail and it would spell the end of 20 years of hard work to rise to the position he got and possibly the end of his impending marriage. Juliette felt that Al was not the rotten apple she imagined he would be and could not get herself to denounce him to the police. Al told her all he could do was to offer the man money and asked Juliette to pass such sum as he could manage to Vera. Juliette agreed. He did his best but it was not enough. He started to embezzle from the garage. Vera also got suspicious and asked Juliette where she got the huge sums of money that she was giving her. Juliette was forced to tell that it was from the man who knocked down her husband. Vera got furious. Juliette told her Al was genuinely sorry that it happened. Her Morrocan friends then traced Al and gave him a good beating. Eventually, the man died. He attended his funeral incognito. But he was not beaten up again.
It was a strange but not entirely unlikely tale, perfect educational material to teach the moral consequences of being a hit and run driver. We see how after the accident, Al's world is falling apart from his guilt: he was nervous at work, distant with
Marion, could not sleep at night, had to go to the bank to get loans and even had to start to do shady deals under the table and could no longer take jokes from his
buddies and to relieve the pressure, even made love to Juliette in his car on a sudden impulse The acting was good, the pace fast and the original music by Grégoire Hetzel excellent and the story well told because until it happened, the spectator was kept guessing how it would all turn out. A mix between a detective story, a tale of moral and an impressionistic diagnostic of the plight of illegal immigrants. The three worlds of the title is the working class world of Al and his mechanic buddies, the middle class world Juliette and the world of illegal immigrant workers in France made to cross path by a fatal accident.
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