In a placeless locale that feels pulled from the United States of a time not quite defined, and in a setting that echoes the late 1960s, a university student known only as “A” grows increasingly radicalized. He believes the campus leftist organization he belongs to isn’t militant enough, and his zeal soon puts him at odds with the university administration: the dean suspends him for political activities, and his girlfriend Anne ends their relationship. As disillusionment hardens, he joins a Marxist group led by Despard, a working-class factory worker who is stoking a broader push for a general strike. When the strike fails and state power clamps down on radicals, A slips underground, his world narrowing to a perilous underground existence.
Losing his university status, A is drafted into the army and chooses to desert when his unit is ordered to suppress another workers’ strike. He finds a fragile sanctuary with Helen, a young bourgeois woman, who hides him in a greenhouse, offering a brief refuge from the political maelstrom outside. Yet the path ahead remains tangled and dangerous. Despard, acting under Party directives, refuses to mobilize his group, leaving A adrift at a moment when action seems both necessary and maddeningly impossible. The story widens as A crosses paths with the radical Leonard II at a bar, where he is drawn into Leonard II’s schemes and the circle that Despard occupies. The plan they pursue is ambitious and violent: to liberate a pawn shop and, more gravely, to assassinate the judge who will oversee the trial of the factory workers.
In the shadows of this intrigue, A’s role in the conspiracy is to carry a secondary bomb—an emergency device intended to detonate if Leonard II’s first bomb fails. The narrative builds toward a tense courtroom moment, as the judge sentences several convicted strikers, and the pressure of possible action presses in on all sides. When Leonard II’s bomb malfunctions, A is left holding the fate of the plot—facing the judge with a device that could alter lives in an instant. The film threads together themes of political idealism, personal risk, and the slippery line between resistance and violence, leaving A at a critical crossroads as the circumstances around him intensify and shift in unpredictable ways.
