Under the German military administration in occupied France during World War II, Marie Latour struggles to keep life afloat with her two children in a cramped, squalid flat, while Paul Latour — a prisoner of war in Germany — fights to stay alive and support them from afar. The stark contrast between confinement and desperation grounds the story in the daily grind of wartime survival, where small acts can bend toward moral compromise and necessity.
A neighboring family, whose husband is likewise sent abroad, faces a desperate situation when the wife becomes pregnant and tries to end the pregnancy. Marie helps her through this crisis, a practical, unsettling choice that drags her deeper into a gray zone where personal need clashes with social rules.
After Paul is released, a quiet and unsettling conversation reveals that a fortune teller predicted “nothing but good things” for Marie’s future, a future that seems to orbit around many women. She confesses a personal dream of becoming a famous singer, yet her heart has cooled toward her husband. He has been wounded, struggles to find work, and resists his wife’s crude and abrupt sexual advances.
Despite their precarious finances, Marie pushes to move to a larger flat. She sustains and expands her illicit enterprise, allowing prostitutes to use their bedrooms during the day, transforming their home into a busy, shadowy workspace amidst the war’s chaos.
When one abortion ends tragically in the death of the woman, the despairing husband takes his own life. Marie’s response is a stoic shrug, a stark sign of how far she has drifted from conventional morality. She hires a maid to help with the growing demand and visits a music teacher who tells her she possesses a remarkable voice, a revelation that fuels her vanity and ambition.
Motivated by the teacher’s praise, Marie then embarks on a daytime affair with a collaborator and offers the maid a higher wage if she sleeps with Paul. Paul is deeply unhappy with this arrangement, and when he returns home early one day to find Marie and her lover asleep together, he chooses to denounce the illicit arrangement to the police, triggering a signal that cannot be silenced.
A recent law enacted by the Vichy regime aims to enforce morality and curb population decline, branding abortion as treasonable. The new crackdown closes in, and Marie is condemned to death and guillotined, a stark end that mirrors the era’s brutal judgments and the consequences of moral compromise in wartime Lyon.
