Jean-Pierre Berckmans

In the early 1950s, in a seaside town, Isabelle, a girl in her late teens,is about to spend an apparently eventless summer between her mother, her friends and a small job for a photographer whose business is lagging. But Isabelle is not the mentally balanced young lady she seems to be. In fact she is doubly traumatized, firstly by the rape she suffered eight years before from a Nazi officer and secondly by the suicide of her father shortly after. What she wants deep inside herself is to find a man, young or less young, who will bring her tenderness and happiness. Will Luc, a young German, or Monsieur Vaudois, her married boss, give her what she lacks ?

Hélène Noris, a young Belgian woman from a bourgeois family, is haunted by a past affair with Tamara — now married to her father. Torn between desire and resentment toward Tamara’s conformist life, Hélène feels alienated in the provincial world she inhabits. To boost his social image, her stepfather René invites Parisian director Jean Gerfaud to stage an avant-garde version of Tartuffe. Tamara flirts with him, but Hélène seduces him first. A passionate, destructive affair begins, entangling love, jealousy, and ambition. When the play’s scandalous premiere sparks outrage, Jean marries Hélène, provoking Tamara’s fury. Yet Hélène, restless and defiant, betrays him with a soldier. In rage and humiliation, Jean confronts her in the “red room,” the space that once embodied their love and now their ruin.

A man writes a play, hoping that it will help him understand the dramatic events his son lived in Greece.