A septuagenarian widow feels revived by an old painter with whom she falls in love.

A subsidiary of Générale Financière d'Investissement (GFI), Medic-Hall, a medical equipment company, employs nine salespeople. As part of the restructuring of the group, management decided to separate from them, without paying them severance pay. For this, the company called on Sébastien Jalabier, a degreasing specialist, who undertakes to make them resign by resorting to various means of pressure: tracking down professional misconduct, humiliation, bullying, thankless tasks ...

A bistro counter will decide the fate of two women. The first, Marie, the owner of a cafe for forty years in a Breton village, wants to realize her dream and go to the city. The second, Joelle, wants to leave town for the countryside.

Joey Wellman, an American cartoonist from Cleveland now largely forgotten at home, visits France with his partner Lena to attend an exhibition in Paris about the comic strip (bande dessinée) which features his work. He also hopes to be reconciled with his daughter Elsie who has been a student in Paris for two years, in flight from the American culture of which she sees her father as a typical example. Elsie is naively infatuated with French literature, and is trying to secure an introduction to the brilliant university professor Christian Gauthier, an expert on Flaubert but also an enthusiast for comic books. The meeting of father and daughter goes badly, but Elsie is persuaded to join Joey and Lena for the weekend at the country house of Gauthier's mother, Isabelle. During a comic-themed masquerade party, all of the characters are made to reconsider their present and past relationships.