Les Palmes de M. Schutz (1997)

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Based on an award-winning play by Jean-Noel Fenwick, this fact-based drama offers a lively account of the lives and professional struggles of Noble prize-winning research scientists Pierre and Marie Curie. The two meet at the Paris School of Physics & Chemistry in a frosty laboratory. There Pierre… More Based on an award-winning play by Jean-Noel Fenwick, this fact-based drama offers a lively account of the lives and professional struggles of Noble prize-winning research scientists Pierre and Marie Curie. The two meet at the Paris School of Physics & Chemistry in a frosty laboratory. There Pierre (Charles Berling) and fellow researcher Gustave Bemont (Christian Charmetant) are busy with their work when the brash Marie Sklodowska bursts in to join them. She has been assigned there at the request of the school director Rodolphe Schutz (Phillipe Noiret), a man determined to have his school win the coveted Science Academy palmes, the highest honor in the French scientific community. Though she apparently speaks no French, Sklodowska proves her brilliance from the start. When not busy in the lab, Sklodowska and Pierre are busy in the boudoir indulging in another kind of experimentation that leads to love and ultimately marriage. This complicates matters for it is not easy to juggle the rigors of science, antagonistic colleagues, national pride and the demands of a family. Science aficionados in the audience may get a tickle from the cameo appearances by two Nobel laureate physicists, Pierre-Gilles de Gennes and Georges Charpak who show up as delivery men coming to unload a huge truckload of radium-bearing rocks. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi