Isabelle Habiague

The action takes place in a typical French town in the early sixties, at the end of the Algerian war. In a fit of criminal madness, a married, affluent and respected town-citizen named Gregoire Duval kills a young woman who spurns his advances. As no one witnesses him committing this crime, he chooses to remain silent while the girl's boyfriend, a young Algerian farm worker, is wrongly convicted. In a strange twist of fate, the killer becomes one of the jurors of the trial and suddenly does everything in his power to defend the wrongly accused young man.

A bistro counter will decide the fate of two women. The first, Marie, the owner of a cafe for forty years in a Breton village, wants to realize her dream and go to the city. The second, Joelle, wants to leave town for the countryside.

Joey Wellman, an American cartoonist from Cleveland now largely forgotten at home, visits France with his partner Lena to attend an exhibition in Paris about the comic strip (bande dessinée) which features his work. He also hopes to be reconciled with his daughter Elsie who has been a student in Paris for two years, in flight from the American culture of which she sees her father as a typical example. Elsie is naively infatuated with French literature, and is trying to secure an introduction to the brilliant university professor Christian Gauthier, an expert on Flaubert but also an enthusiast for comic books. The meeting of father and daughter goes badly, but Elsie is persuaded to join Joey and Lena for the weekend at the country house of Gauthier's mother, Isabelle. During a comic-themed masquerade party, all of the characters are made to reconsider their present and past relationships.

A septuagenarian widow feels revived by an old painter with whom she falls in love.