Although the title of Jacques Maillot's first feature effort, Nos Vies Heureuses (Our Happy Lives), definitely suggests a certain beatitude, it hasn't been an easy ride for the director.

Maillot's potential had been recognised in France after two promising short films: 75 Centilitres De Prières, which won the Prix Jean-Vigo and the Special Jury Prize at the Clermont Ferrand Festival in 1993, and Corps Inflammable, which picked up a Cesar nomination the following year.

Through his work on these two pictures, Maillot hooked up with producer Laurent Bénégui and his production house Magouric. When Maillot decided to try his hand on a feature, he enlisted the screenwriting help of Éric Veinard who had also directed a film for Magouric. In February 1997, script finished, the production process began - and immediately hit financial difficulties.

The director originally envisaged a budget of F20 million ($3.3 million), but was forced to rethink when France's National Cinema Centre refused an advance on receipts. Thanks to Gallic pay-TV giant Canal+, and two regional film commissions, Maillot pulled in a revised budget of F9 million ($1.5 million), and a tiring 19 months after finishing the script, he finally began shooting.

A tightly woven ensemble piece, Nos Vies Heureuses follows the intertwining stories of six characters whose lives intersect through friendship, love and suffering. As the film begins, Julie (Marie Payen) is released from the hospital following a suicide attempt, and Ali (Samy Bouajila) has just come to France from Morocco to follow his studies.

Emilie (Camille Japy) and her boyfriend, meanwhile, are in the midst of a break-up, Lucas (Jean-Michel Portal) is busy finding himself, Cécile (Cécile Richard) is struggling with boredom, and militant Catholic Jean-Paul (Eric Bonicatto) is keeping the faith. Each has to map out his or her own future, even though their destinies are linked.

Maillot has said that his desire to make this film - best described as The Big Chill à la Française - came from an experience he had as a high-school student when one of his teachers took the class to see the Maurice Pialat movie Passe Ton Bac D'Abord, about a group of provincial teenagers.

"I had already seen some films, but that day I had the feeling that I was discovering cinema," he recalled. "What was on screen was my and my friends' lives: boredom, brutality, the emptiness of our lives.

"From poor aspirations to still-born desires to dreams of escape. Pialat gave me something precious which almost cancelled out the sadness of his film - the sensation of existing a little bit more because someone looked at me while looking at my peers.

"If Nos Vies Heureuses has one ambition," Maillot continues, "it's to make an elegy of some people whom I believe I know and to transform them into heroes of fiction in order to give justice to their beauty; the humiliations they suffer; the uphill battles they lead; the hopes that keep them going, despite everything.

"These people do not represent only themselves but the fragile ties they have known how to sew between them which gave me the arrogance and the naïveté to refer to them as 'We'. [Hopefully] others can recognise themselves in there as well."

Nos Vies Heureuses is the only French film in competition helmed by a first-timer, and despite his relative inexperience Maillot is said to have a true flair for directing actors. We heard the same things last year about Eric Zonca's debut La Vie Revée Des Anges, which also bowed in competition and earned a shared acting prize for its two leads.

From Dream Life to Happy Lives? For Maillot at least, just walking up the red-carpeted steps of the Palais will be compensation for the setbacks his film has endured.

"Our first victory was that this film exists," he told Studio magazine recently. "The second was that the adventure came out so beautifully. So, to go to Cannes - what a magnificent gift! Could we ever have imagined a more beautiful symbol than to walk up the steps all together?" Nancy Tartaglione