France, 1893. Joseph Bouvier attempts to shoot his love who refused to marry him and to commit suicide. Upon release from the filthy asylum where he was placed, with bullets still remaining in his head, he wanders the country roads and rapes and murders many teenagers over years. The judge Rousseau captures him, but to serve his ambition seeks to avoid that Bouvier is simply declared insane.

In the fall of 1963, Anne is becoming a teenager. She lives in Paris with her mother and her older sister, Frédérique. They're just back from summer at the beach with their father. School starts. A turbulent year awaits them both.

A middle-aged woman leaves her partner and drifts back to her ex-husband, while the lives of her middle class friends intersect with her own.

Successful writer/director Bernard Rougerie is at a creative dead end and decides to isolate himself from his wife in order to complete the script for his next film. Bernard moves into an apartment building whose tenants are in the midst of a revolt against their abusive landlord. Reluctant at first, he joins their cause and then becomes involved in an affair with young, unemployed resident Anne.

A lonely and unsociable man is spying on customers in a department store in Geneva. He gets his eyes on a gorgeous creature with a musical instrument.

A man walks a length of railroad track, looking for his elderly mother whom he believes fell from the train at some point. He brings his daughter along.

Eight years after May '68, they are all in their forties and all met to live in a small village in Provence: Julie, Simon, Alice, Maria, Gustave, Claude and Claudine.