With 120 actors, 600 participants, 1300 costumes, 220 sets, and after two years of work, this film tells the fascinating story of Molière over four hours, and explores the century that he lived in. How did this young boy, born in 1622 to an upholsterer and a loving mother that he was to loose too soon, become the prodigious actor, and universally acclaimed author that was so well-known, and yet so little was known about him? From his childhood to his death, we follow Molière and his travelling companions, in their joy, misery and glory throughout a savage yet refined XVIIth century France, sharing their first theatrical adventures, their successes and failures, their valiant struggles and moments of cowardice. This familiar and spectacular saga where the devout clash with the libertine, and famished peasants with wigged courtesans, is about the life of an honest man who exhausts himself in an unceasing struggle to practice his art in a century filled with repression and violent hypocrisy.
