In wartime Paris, a tangle of romance and secrecy unfolds across Montmartre and the surrounding streets as the looming Second World War casts its shadow over everyday life.
Geoff arranges a rendezvous with his first love, Patricia, hoping to recapture their earlier passion in a Montmartre studio that glows with memory and possibility. At the same time, the concierge's son the concierge's son persuades his own first love, Simone, to scale the same studio bedroom window, convinced it will be empty for the night. Geoff soon discovers that Patricia has grown bitter with the years, and the warmth that once defined their relationship has cooled to something more muted and fragile. When they stumble upon the two young lovers in the bedroom, the encounter unfolds into a comic, light-hearted scramble, as they find themselves forced to crawl under the concierge’s door to slip away unseen.
Running late to school, the concierge's son spies a young American girl studying at the American Hospital of Paris in Neuilly, who is entangled with an older doctor—Doctor Harrison. The pairs must guard their affair not only from the ever-watchful concierge but also from a disapproving public, often meeting in shady “hôtels de passe” to keep their secrets intact. Yet a seaside escape to Normandy drifts into view, and the tensions of romance and war push the characters toward decisive choices as the war edges toward its outbreak.
In occupied Paris, Marcel, the managing director of a major cement business, arrives at the studio he rents for his mistress, Josette, and unexpectedly runs into a German Oberleutnant on the landing. It is Christmas Eve, and old enmities are momentarily set aside, even as Marcel must hurry to deliver his latest gifts to those he cares for: to his wife, Heloise, and to his mother, The Mother, who live on opposite sides of Paris. Each of them offers Marcel the classic French Christmas dish of oysters, which his mistress also provides for her party, accompanied by her music teacher and her student, Grondin.
The city’s wartime tempo is relentless; the only practical transport—velo-taxis, a bicycle rickshaw network—tests Marcel’s ability to be everywhere at once. He must juggle family obligations, lover’s rendezvous, and his role in a tense, hidden world, often feeling the strain as he consumes the oysters in a hurried sequence, perhaps a little green around the gills, while navigating a secret meeting with the French Resistance.
As the days grind on, the threads of these intertwined lives tighten, and the war’s shadow transforms private rooms and public streets alike. When the smoke clears after the conflict, the people who navigated these perilous arrangements—Geoff, Patricia, Marcel, Josette, and their entwined circles—are brought back together in the same old studio, their hopes and disappointments carried forward like a fragile, stubborn thread of memory, tying a city and its people to their past with a quiet, enduring resonance.
