Officially declared missing in 1945, Gaston Boissac suddenly comes back at 70 years old in his home village.

In the 1960s, orphans from Reunion Island were deported to France to repopulate a department where rural exodus was rampant.

This symbolic drama from director Benoit Jacques underscores the characters' human need for affection. Children steal lemons for the thrill, while women steal other women's men from them just to prove they can. Drug smuggling, clandestine love affairs, and two lovers involved with the production of Shakespeare's Othello carry on with their own off-stage tragedy.

Fifteen-year-old Camille is a vulnerable and a strong-willed seductress- she chooses, she takes, she leaves; she can go very far in her desire for freedom. She is the daughter of disunited parents, Armand, a professor and Colette, an intellectual bourgeois. She manages to seduce Jean-Louis, a professor of letters of thirty-seven years, friend and colleague of her father. She makes him commit a lot of extravagance - he even dyed blond. Later she had a passion for Samuel, a former student of Jean-Louis, lout and trafficker. She is not easy, men learn at their expense, either sentimentally, as with the teacher, or that the first sexual experience come to ignite the relationship with Samuel.

A journalist is assigned to interview an eccentric anthropologist who has exhumed the skeleton of Jörg Jenatsch, a revered freedom fighter who was mysteriously murdered in 1639. Initially disinterested, the journalist begins to uncover unflattering truths about the national hero and experiences visions in which he seems to be witnessing events that transpired over 300 years ago. As he obsessively pursues the investigation, his personal life and his grip on reality disintegrate, drawing him relentlessly toward the fatal carnival at which Jenatsch was killed.

Madeleine, who runs a disco on the French-Swiss border, dreams of going to Paris to pursue a singing career. Her lover, Paul, who makes his living smuggling money, gold and goods across the border, plans to emigrate to Canada. Mali, a pretty young Algerian woman who lives in France and works in Switzerland, would like to be anywhere except where she is. Louis, born on a Swiss farm and trained as a clockmaker, would give anything to leave his mistress, Lucie, and move in with Mali.

A postman in a small mountain village finds a woman and her son both dead in the "grotte aux loups" (cave of wolves). He soon begins to realize than it's not natural death, and that someone in the village in behind their murder, while tragic events occur.

In this sequel to Les Bronzes (1978) summer has passed, but that doesn't mean the fun has to end for Bernard, Nathalie, Gigi, Jerome, Popeye, Jean-Claude, and Christiane.