At the end of the school day, 11-year-old Charlie Ferdinand Martin is collected by his father Serge Vincent Lindon, and they drive to an isolated house where Serge has an assignation with his mistress. Silently Charlie plays outside with his boomerang, a quiet image that sits beside the growing tension in the other threads of the day. Pierre Benoît Magimel is a natural sciences teacher at the collège where Charlie studies; he is unsettled by the arrival of Matthieu Patrick Pineau, an old colleague who has since become a famous archaeologist. Matthieu is about to lead a new expedition, delivering a series of lectures about a prehistoric hunter named Dirk who mysteriously left his tribe, and his presence stirs both curiosity and unease in Pierre. The local mayor, Jean-Louis Bertagnat Jean-Pierre Bacri, officiates with ceremonial gusto, though his manner is awkward and imperfect, hinting at the imperfect human realities behind public displays. He later seeks relief with his mistress, a young municipal worker, a detail that threads through the town’s private and public lives.
Meanwhile, Joss Benoît Poelvoorde—out on parole—plans a new job, a sign that trouble still simmers beneath the surface. Matthieu offers Pierre a place on his expedition, but Pierre hesitates, torn between his current life and the lure of something beyond the familiar walls of the collège. When school finally closes, Charlie leads Pierre to the secluded house, where the scene unfolds: Pierre finds his wife Séverine Sophie Cattani with Serge, a startling confrontation that binds the fates of three married couples in a single, tense moment.
As these revelations unfold, Joss has not finished scrambling to escape the consequences of his crime. He bungles the robbery and clutches a stolen television as he tries to vanish, while the mayor remains a quiet spectator from the beach—a personal space where he has long pondered his own complicated life. In a swift, almost cinematic reversal, a witness comes forward and Joss is left with a glimmer of freedom, a turn that reshapes everyone's choices in the days that follow.
The aftermath tightens the emotional knots: Pierre, faced with the exposed truth, chooses to stay with Séverine, rebuilding a fragile sense of partnership rather than stepping away from the life he has known. Charlie, with a child’s stubborn courage, helps shepherd his parents toward reconciliation, suggesting a healing that sits somewhere between forgiveness and practical compromise. And Jean-Louis Bertagnat, the mayor who once strutted with ceremonial bravado, ultimately returns to his own younger lover, an ending that circles back to the film’s theme of imperfect, human connections.
In the end, the film weaves together these intersecting stories—the fragile balance of family, the pull of old ambitions, and the quiet, stubborn hope that people can find a way to repair what has been broken—leaving viewers with a meditation on what it means to grow up, to grow together, and to face the tangled loyalties that bind us all.
