In 1937, seven-year-old Paul, César Chauveau is dropped off by his parents at a religious boarding school in the dead of night, on the eve of World War II. The film follows his early loneliness and the fragile start of a troubled path that will reverberate through the years ahead. As the war unfolds and Europe is pulled into conflict, the story shifts to a harsher truth about survival, belonging, and the uneasy mirrors people hold up to one another.
Years later, during the Nazi occupation of France, Paul, now thirteen, returns to live with his cold–hearted mother, Annie Kovaks who doesn’t even like him. Abandoned and emotionally distant from both his mother and sister, he slips away from school and spends his days wandering the streets of Paris. In this precarious atmosphere, he seeks connections with older men, often taking the role of an errand boy for German soldiers, who reward him with cigarettes and small gifts. The film does not sensationalize these choices; it presents them as desperate responses to a surrounding world in wartime turmoil, where vulnerability and danger coexist in starkly intimate ways.
One powerful, jarring image comes from the occupation itself: Paul is seen in a scene where he comforts a naked, shaved-bald woman with a large swastika painted on her breasts, as she is paraded through the streets and subjected to the crowd’s anti-collaborationist purge. This moment, tense and unforgettable, underscores the way fear and coercion fracture personal boundaries during occupation and social upheaval. The film gestures toward the moral ambiguities of the era without offering easy absolutes, inviting viewers to confront how a young life might bend under pressure, isolation, and conflicting loyalties.
As France moves toward liberation, Paul finds himself drawn into the activities of the French Resistance. Yet the pull of companionship and protection does not vanish; instead, he gravitates toward the American soldiers who appear in the streets as a beacon of safety, friendship, and, for him, a different kind of tenderness. They welcome him into their circle, providing not only moral shelter but a steady stream of chocolate and cigarettes, and in these exchanges he experiences affection and sexual encounters with men older than him. The narrative keeps a careful, unflinching gaze on these experiences, allowing them to shape Paul’s sense of self in a world that has been torn apart and rebuilt so many times already.
After the war, the cycle continues, and Paul’s longing for connection—with men who are older and with the sense of belonging he craves—persists even as he contemplates a future in the arts. The path toward acting becomes a real possibility, and the film traces how that ambition threads through the aftermath of conflict, suggesting that art can offer both escape and a form of witness to a life lived under extraordinary pressure.
The story culminates in a quiet, almost ritual moment on a street where a stranger asks for a light from a smoking Paul, who is about to embark on a small role as an extra in Marcel Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis. In an unusual, uncredited cameo, the stranger is Gérard Blain, the director of the film itself. The meta-layer is deliberate: the depictions seen in the movie mirror Blain’s own life, including being abandoned by his father as a kid, leaving school at thirteen, and entering relationships with older men while holding onto acting aspirations. This self-reflective echo adds a documentary-like texture to the drama, inviting audiences to consider how art can mirror personal history and how cinema can blur the lines between fiction and lived experience.
