Writing
Paul has been imprisoned for ten years for passing counterfeit money. He feels victimized enough, both for the prison time and for the crime which led to it; he committed the crime to give his wife the nice things she asked him for. When he discovers that she has remarried a quite wealthy man, he is outraged. However, his ire is not due to her disloyalty to him; he loved their only son to distraction, and now the boy has no knowledge or memory of him.
Philippe is an older man and an industrialist whose wife is confined to her bed. They have no children. As he is preparing to go on a vacation to the seaside, he strikes up an acquaintance with Paul, a young working-class boy, and decides to bring him along. This is Paul's first glimpse of how the other half lives, with their first-class hotels and so on. When he meets some aristocratic young people at the resort, he tries to put over the fiction that he is of their class, with poor success.
After the death of his parents, Pierre is forced to care for his younger sister Nathalie by committing petty crimes. In a recurring motif of Gérard Blain’s cinema, Pierre is taken under the wing of an older gay man, Hubert , who offers him work and financial security; but when Hubert makes advances to him, Pierre robs him and takes up with a group of radical leftists who are planning terrorist attacks. Without employment, Pierre loses Nathalie to child services and spirals into desperation, finally erupting in an act of horrific violence. An x-ray showing the largely undiagnosed sickness of its time, and a stern warning to ours.
