At the heart of the city, a quiet, drifting man named Alphonse Tram, Gérard Depardieu, strikes up a late-night chat with an exhausted accountant as they ride the rails toward home. The accountant, a man rooted in orthodox social norms, grows visibly uneasy as Tram’s meandering talk unfolds, even when Tram tries to hand him a bloodstained knife to defuse whatever danger he fears might come next. The two argue, and the knife is left on a seat a few feet away, only to disappear from sight as their conversation continues.
That same night, Tram encounters the same man again, this time in a tunnel linking metro lines, lying with the knife stabbed into his stomach. Tram has no ready explanation for Inspecteur Morvandieu, a wary and irritable lawman who is moving into a new apartment in a near-deserted building and who dismisses the incident with a sigh. Morvandieu suspects that the killer could be Tram himself, a notion the loner neither confirms nor denies, leaving the inspector with more questions than answers. The officer’s mood darkens, and he sends Tram away, signaling that he’s had enough of these grisly puzzles to last a lifetime. Soon after, Tram’s wife is killed, and the city’s strange orbit begins to tilt even further.
The situation escalates when the man responsible for the murder—Jean Carmet in the role of Le vieil assassin, the perpetrator—arrives at Tram’s doorstep and openly confesses. The moment unfolds with a surprising ease: the three men share a drink together as if the confession were a mere formality. A third figure then appears, claiming to have witnessed everything in the métro, and the plot threads tangle even more. Tram sets out to confront another man in a car, but the driver’s own intentions seem to align against him, as if fate is tilted toward tragedy.
Meanwhile, the widow is drawn into the orbit of this tangled trio, and a doctor arrives to treat her wounds. The doctor, Bernard Crombey, becomes involved in the precarious web of care and secrecy, and the widow ultimately shares a bed with him, compounding the sense that nothing is truly settled. The men decide to flee to the countryside, hoping to escape the pull of their own guilt and the city’s strange gravity; yet the pursuit of peace is abruptly interrupted when the murderer is killed, mistaken for Tram by someone lurking in the shadows.
What follows is a tense finale on the water. Tram is ensnared by a beautiful young girl, the moonlit danger closing in as he is led onto a boat. He manages to complicate the inspector’s trajectory and, in a cruel twist of fate, is shot by the very woman who trapped him—she is the daughter of the man found dead in the metro, a revelation that casts the entire sequence in a new, bleak light. The film leaves us with a lingering sense of how a single, dangerous misunderstanding can ripple through a city, pulling strangers into a web of murder, suspicion, and fragile moments of connection. The result is a stark, darkly humorous meditation on fate, coincidence, and the fragility of human lives.
If you’d like, I can tailor this summary to emphasize certain themes or adjust how the linked actors appear in the text.
