Martial [Daniel Auteuil] Pasquier is released from a mental institution after years of struggle with a severe nervous breakdown. During his stay, he falls silent and stops speaking to everyone around him, including his wife, [Thérèse Liotard] Régine. When he returns home, he confronts a brisk, busy world that continues to move forward without him, and his mother, [Danielle Darrieux] Madame Pasquier, a diligent businesswoman who runs a supermarket empire, believes that giving her son real responsibilities might spark a sense of purpose and help him rejoin life.
To reintroduce him to the real world, Martial is dispatched on a business trip to Limoges to check on one of the family’s stores and attempt to revive its flagging performance. The assignment plunges him into tasks that require leadership and interaction with store staff—duties he has never navigated before. His natural difficulty with people becomes a real obstacle as he struggles to assert himself and to understand the dynamics of a working team. In this rocky process, he uncovers a troubling truth: the branch’s near-collapse is linked to the manager, [Jean-Pierre Marielle] Monsieur Fonfrin, who has been padding the books. The realization that someone within the operation is manipulating numbers adds a layer of tension to Martial’s fragile return to responsibility.
Because Martial cannot easily shoulder the full burden of the job, he finds himself drawn to the crooked manager, who extends an invitation to dinner for him and his wife, [Dominique Lavanant] Madame Fonfrin. That social encounter becomes a turning point of sorts, as Martial meets Francine, a maid portrayed by [Sandrine Bonnaire], an eccentric and lively young woman whose presence offers a spark of brightness in his dim world. What begins as a cautious acquaintance soon blooms into a brief, sincere romance that marks the first time in years that Martial feels a real sense of closeness to another person.
Francine’s gifts and attention give Martial a new, fragile hope, and for a short time the heaviness of his life lightens. He pours his heart into the relationship, occasionally neglecting his looming duties and the responsibilities at the Limoges store as he basks in this renewed affection. Yet the romance is fleeting, and its end leaves him back on familiar ground: the long road of recovery is interrupted by the harsh judgment of the world he must re-enter. Upon returning to Paris, Martial is deemed incompetent once again and is re-admitted to the hospital, their once-quiet hope fading into the quiet echo of a life that still struggles to find its footing.
The film threads a careful, intimate portrait of a man trying to piece together a sense of self after a long period of isolation. It delves into the delicate balance between duty and desire, the impact of close relationships on a fragile mind, and the social dynamics that shape the path to reintegration. Through Martial’s experiences, it invites viewers to reflect on resilience, vulnerability, and the sometimes fragile line between progress and relapse, all while maintaining a restrained, human-centered perspective that keeps the emotional core front and center.
