An unlikely friendship develops between a hitman and a suicidal guy who have both checked into the same hotel for different reasons.

Great actors have interpreted, in the theater or in the cinema, the roles of François Pignon or François Perrin. But the one who, without any doubt, knew how to give him his letters of nobility on the big screen was Pierre Richard who interpreted seven times the characters of Perrin and Pignon. Two cult characters from the imagination of the famous director and screenwriter Francis Veber. For 15 years, the collaboration of the Pierre Richard-Francis Veber duo offered huge public and popular successes that have stood the test of time and entered the pantheon of the greatest French comedies.

This documentary brings a lighting on the originality and the specificity of the actor-author Pierre Richard, improbable synthesis of the talking ant silent films, heir to Buster Keaton for the gestural one and the expression of the body, and to Groucho Marx for the puns and the burlesque verbal one. Conceived like a voyage inside the universe of Pierre Richard, "the Art of unsteadiness" makes it possible to better understand its step, its method of actor, director and gag man. With through many testimonies, extracts of films and archives documents, drawn up here the portrait of one of the large last burlesques.

Mathilde de Blanzac is abducted on her way home from an evening at the opera with her wealthy industrialist husband. Her pathetic pieds-nickelés kidnappers begin by holding her hostage at the home of Petit Jean, a country bumpkin, before demanding a ransom from her husband. At the same time, Hubert de Pifre, a fighter pilot in distress, ejects over Petit Jean's farm.