Hélène, an anesthetist in Biarritz, barely swerves away from hitting a pedestrian one night, and a chance coffee after the near-miss turns into an impulsive meeting that ends at a diner so she can file a report. By the next morning, the man she met, Gilles Tisserand, has fallen in love, asking for a date even as she remains cool and distant.
Gilles has just returned from a trip to New York with his friend Bernard, a carefree, unemployed aspiring musician who lives for the moment and his steady girlfriend, Colette, a cheerful post office clerk. The two men crash at the Hotel de la Gare, run by Gilles’ mother and his younger sister, Elise. Bernard dreams of seducing Elise, a voracious reader who rarely goes out, but she repeatedly rejects him.
When Gilles invites Hélène to join him and Bernard and Colette for a dinner at a casino restaurant, the evening ends in tension. Hélène’s distaste for Bernard’s swagger clashes with Gilles’s own disappointment when she seems to look down on his friend. He walks away, convinced that a woman of her class could never truly love someone less well off. But Hélène’s feelings twist in the opposite direction: she cannot let him go. She seeks him out, and soon they dive into a relationship that surprises them both.
Gilles finds work as a tourist guide and even helps renovate Hélène’s beachfront apartment, yet her past continues to haunt their romance. She still mourns the architect she loved, who drowned in Biarritz more than a year earlier. His death brought her here, and she has kept a circle of friends, including Jacqueline at a cafe where she first met Gilles, and Rudel, an older surgeon and occasional casino gambler who once introduced her to the architect. Hélène owns La Salamandre, a large abandoned house outside town the architect had planned to occupy; despite its disrepair, she hopes to move there, encouraged by Gilles even as he presses for a fresh start away from the oceanfront.
Tensions rise when Bernard and Gilles clash over Hélène’s affections. One night in a park, Bernard’s bravado leads to trouble when Luc’s gay friend, L'ami de Luc, is targeted, and a police inquiry later uncovers stolen items in Bernard’s hotel room. He is sent to jail, leaving Colette distressed by the consequences of Bernard’s impulse-driven choices.
Moving to La Salamandre is a rocky transition: the place is cold, distant from town, and the dynamic between Hélène and Gilles becomes more volatile. As she slowly opens up about her private life, Gilles grows more temperamental, possessive, and unpredictable, threatening to derail their fragile closeness. He even proposes a trip to London but retreats at the last moment. One night, he drinks too much, creates a scene on the beach, and ends up slapping Hélène. Hurt, she resolves to return to Paris. On the train, she tears up a photo of Gilles but cannot bring herself to discard it entirely.
With Bernard released from jail, the Hotel de la Gare is renamed Hôtel des Amériques under new ownership. At the reopening party, Colette is moved to tears when Luc reveals that Bernard has left town with some money he’d tossed her way after forgiving his earlier misdeeds. Elise meets Rudel at the party, sharing a kiss, while Gilles learns from Elise that Hélène has returned to Paris for good. He rushes to the station, only to discover he must wait a day for the next train. The night is spent rehearsing what he plans to say to her, tears streaming down his face as he contemplates what lies ahead.
