hoffman/tomlin versus french lady
hoffman/tomlin and the french lady embody opposing schools of existential thought...
roughly these characters mirror/represent what real existential thinkers/philosophers in history?
Caterine (French lady): nihilism/absurdism - so similar to Camus, Sartre, Nietzsche, Dali, more recently Chuck Palahniuk and Brett Easton Ellis.
Bernard and Vivianne: a sort of humanist/romantic hybrid, similar to Emerson, Hindu and Buddhist spirituality, Thoreau, more modern analogues might be the novelists Thomas Pynchon and Tom Robbins. Hegel is also in there.
A lot of modern art and especially novels grapple with something resembling the two opposing schools - Vonnegut, Pynchon, Joseph Heller, John Fowles, Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson - all wrote novels with recurring themes of the question of whether people really are interconnected and whether there is some unseen system or (metaphorical) conspiracy which links us all, or whether everything is random and apparently meaningful links are nothing of the sort.