"The person who really made me want to make cinema was Cassavetes — that kind of filming, actors being used in a completely personal way outside the star system, giving the impression that this was documentary reporting when in fact it was perfectly constructed. Husbands, to me, is a key film." 
— Jean-François Stévenin

After the funeral of a friend, three middle-aged New Yorkers find themselves unable to return to work or family life. Drinking, arguing and roughhousing over a drawn-out, grief-fuelled night, they eventually decide on impulse to fly to London. There, far from their wives and routines, the men extend their vacation from adult responsibility, as Cassavetes pushes his dilatory and mercurial cinema to new extremes alongside real-life best friends Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara. 

Cassavetes was a crucial influence on the cinema of Stévenin, who credited his "American cousin" with "Continuity" on Passe Montagne, and spoke of how the phrase "that was pure Cassavetes!" had entered the parlance of his circle as an expression of approbation. Cassavetes’s love for his characters and collaborators, along with his dedication to channelling tension into the creation of art, gave Stévenin a model for the kind of filmmaker he wanted to be. Paying tribute to the director after his death, he wrote: "It’s very simple: without him, I would never have made films."