Justin, Julien Rivière, a boy living in a small town in the Rhône-Alpes region, is awakened in the middle of the night by his mother Mireille, Catherine Deneuve. His widowed grandfather, Victor, Didier Bezace, tells him that his father, Ivan, Benoît Magimel, is dead. The next day, Alex, Daniel Auteuil, Justin’s uncle and Ivan’s little brother, arrives for the funeral accompanied by a woman, Juliette, Fabienne Babe. Justin notices the rising tension among the adults, and in a quiet act of self-preservation he takes his father’s gun and hides it. The story then shifts through time, moving backward and forward to shed light on how Ivan’s death came to pass.
Alex, who has rebelled against his family by becoming a cop, works in the deprived La Duchère district of Lyon. He begins with a fateful encounter from a year before Ivan’s death, when he first meets Juliette, who is brought to his office after a shoplifting arrest; he lets her off. He encounters her again one evening at the sleazy nightclub run by his elder brother, Ivan. Ivan is a crime boss who runs a popular club with a drag revue, funding his enterprise through a stolen‑auto ring led by Jimmy, Pierre Perez Juliette’s brother. The two siblings are on opposite sides of the law, and their relationship is tense from the start. Ivan is proud to show Alex that he is achieving more through crime than Alex does through the law. After their second encounter, Alex and Juliette begin a tortured affair, meeting regularly for sex, though he is not in love with her. The affair is further complicated by Juliette’s emotional and sexual involvement with Marie, a professor of philosophy. Alex spies on Marie, adding another layer of surveillance and longing to a web of loyalties. Ivan learns of Juliette’s liaison with Alex and issues threats to Juliette.
Ivan and his gang, including Juliette, plan a coordinated theft of cars at a railway depot. The heist goes disastrously awry, and Ivan is shot dead along with a security guard. Juliette, coerced into participating against Jimmy’s wishes, is left distraught by Ivan’s death. In the aftermath, Juliette’s emotional instability leads her toward self‑destructive acts, including two suicide attempts—one while staying with her brother and another while visiting Marie. Marie has Juliette interned in a psychiatric hospital to recuperate. Alex asks Marie for the address of Juliette’s clinic, but she has disappeared. In the search for Juliette, Marie visits the housing estate where she once lived; after Ivan’s cremation, Alex makes efforts to connect with his nephew, though he struggles to find him. At a local fair, Justin threatens Alex with an air rifle, and the boy then learns the truth about his father’s death from his grandfather Victor.
Marie visits Alex, who explains that Juliette was involved in the heist and that he is actively trying to locate her. The two develop an uneasy friendship as they, from a distance, work to protect Juliette. Later Alex visits Marie and finds she has become a recluse, writing a book about Juliette. He reassures her that Juliette is safe, even as he receives the manuscript and the tapes of Juliette’s voice in the mail. He eventually travels to Marseille in an effort to see Juliette, but decides to leave her be when he observes that she appears to have rebuilt a new life, working in a bookshop. Justin has inherited the family’s wary temperament and does not trust his uncle, yet he forms a contrasting bond with Jimmy. In the end, Jimmy decides to marry Ivan’s widow, Mireille, cementing a fragile, complex web of loyalties that threads through the family’s past and present.
