A quiet postwar investigation in the small French town of Ciboure opens with a gunshot victim found in house 26 on Dante Street. The wounded woman is the famous actress Madeleine Thibault, Evgeniya Kozyreva, and as she regains consciousness in the hospital, she begins to recount the events that led to this moment, guiding the investigator through a long, layered memory.
In 1940, with German troops closing in on Paris, Madeleine Thibault, her manager, Greene, and her young son Charles flee south to the Basque coast, to a town where her former husband Philip Tibo lives. They are driven to move quickly when their car runs out of gas, and the dangerous road ahead becomes personal as Charles ventures out to find fuel and never quite returns. It later emerges that he is briefly detained by approaching German forces and released weeks later as a young man who has already become sympathetic to the fascist cause.
Upon reaching Ciboure, Madeleine discovers the occupation is already entrenched. After daringly slapping a German officer, she is forced into hiding in her father Ippolito’s house, sharing shelter with Jourdan, a local who has a brutal past of his own—hitting a German officer and killing a Frenchman who joined the fascists. The house is soon raided by German officials, and although Jourdan is not found, suspicion immediately falls on Charles. The tension inside the walls grows as Madeleine agrees to participate in a stage production staged for the occupying force; the script’s heroine is meant to kill her former lover, a cruel echo of the larger betrayal unfolding outside.
During a tense performance, with Charles watching from the audience, Madeleine shoots and kills the local “Fuhrer.” The act, staged with the help of a theatre costume designer, becomes a defiant symbol of resistance and a critical escape route for them all. Yet the victory is short-lived: Greene is mortally wounded on the street, and with his dying breath he reveals that Charles was among the three who attacked him.
The costume designer’s son becomes a hidden ally, pulling Madeleine deeper into the underground Resistance. After the war ends, she returns to Ciboure only to learn that Philip Tibo was hanged by the Germans before they left, a man who had also taken part in the Resistance. Charles arrives again, this time with a cadre of friends, and Madeleine recognizes one of the German officers who had hunted Jourdan in their village house. She accuses Charles of betraying his father, a charge he denies, and when he refuses to accompany her to the authorities, he draws a revolver in a fatal moment that ends with one of his friends shooting Madeleine instead.
The wounded Madeleine survives only long enough to see the truth come to light: the investigator who recorded her testimony reveals that he had collaborated with the German forces and continued to hold sympathies with them. Madeleine Thibault dies, and a decade passes in a quiet, unresolved shadow.
In the restaurant of the town, Charles returns, now older and quietly haunted, and is recognized by the costume designer’s son, who has no memory of the girl’s past—or the people who pursued it. The son’s quiet, ironic remark reframes the whole story: Madeleine’s killers have not been brought to account, yet the memory of what happened lingers. As a final, cutting line lingers in the air, the dresser’s son sums up a stark truth about a changed France:
> France is no longer the same. And it's not easy to break. No matter how they marched there.
