After a brief liaison with a German soldier, the working-class Madeleine, Anaïs Demoustier, is publicly shamed as a "collabo" while she is pregnant. In the immediate postwar years she works as a waitress at the hôtel Beaurivage in Brittany and raises the German's son Daniel, Paul Beaurepaire. She meets, falls in love with, and quickly marries François, Vincent Lacoste, a postgraduate archaeology student at the Sorbonne and younger son of a wealthy industrialist.
Daniel grows up bearing the weight of his origins, and his anger flares when he is expelled from school after attacking another pupil. The family eventually moves to Paris, where François’s last male lover tries to gain entry to their flat, only for François to pretend that this person was merely a college friend who was certified insane after an academic grievance. The enraged lover burns down the couple’s house and nearly destroys François’s near-complete thesis, prompting them to restart their work from scratch.
As François writes, the couple relocates to run a dance club near an American military base. Madeleine receives the painful news that her estranged father has died and returns to his grave, a visit that is marred by locals excreting on their car windscreen. At the club, Madeleine and François shelter Jimmy, the Black American serviceman, Morgan Bailey, who lacks a leave pass. They hide him in their bedroom during a police check, and the trio’s dynamics unfold as they begin to explore intimacy. Madeleine wakes him with a foot massage as he sleeps, and François briefly participates, kissing Jimmy’s back and Madeleine on the lips. When Jimmy discovers François attempting to join in as a sexual partner, he leaves, angry at being treated as a “plaything” and at the suggestion that Jimmy might be gay. Madeleine confronts François about his bisexuality, but the couple reconciles and continues their complicated relationship.
With the thesis finally completed, the family welcomes Jeanne and moves back to Paris so François can take up an academic post, though Madeleine grows tired of bourgeois life. François’s compulsive cottaging with his under-age student, Jean, triggers a police investigation. Madeleine denies the accusations, but François is arrested and warned that a long prison sentence could follow. She manages to keep Daniel and Jeanne unaware of the danger.
When François returns from the police station on bail, Madeleine sets off with Daniel and Jeanne for their day at school, only to witness François’s suicide, who throws himself under a truck. After his funeral, Jeanne vows to immerse herself in books in her father’s office, starting with a translation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, while Daniel signs on for five years in the army. Madeleine, who is running her own bar and awaiting a cancer operation, finally writes a letter to the Wehrmacht archives admitting his real paternity and acknowledging that she was wrong to conceal it. That letter will allow Daniel to discover whether his biological father was killed on the Eastern Front.
The story unfolds with a quiet, unflinching look at love and loss, the weight of secrets, and the ways in which a single family navigates history, memory, and the choices that define them.
