It's New Year's Day. Antoine Garnier has decided to invite all his family and friends to dinner at his house the day after New Year's Eve. But the family being large, he is going to be overwhelmed since no less than 35 guests are expected.

Two middle-class couples compete with each other by providing false information about their respective situations in order to dazzle each other into marrying their two children.

As soon as they arrive at the barracks, the new contingent reveals some characters who will give their officers a hard time. There is the handsome, resourceful man, the technocrat in love, the bootlicker, the "Jamaican" who only moves to music, the shortsighted man... and all the others. Sometimes to see the nurse undress, sometimes to arrange an appointment with a fiancée, sometimes to cuckold the obtuse non-commissioned officer whose wife is volcanic, sometimes to have a free lunch in a great restaurant, the handsome man invariably deploys a wealth of cunning. And each time it is the colonel's servile driver who gets caught instead of him.

Young Berthe, deeply moved by a cinema screening of the notoriously sultry Le Dernier Tango à Paris, goes to the address where most of the action takes place, a building overlooking the Bir-Hakeim Bridge metro station. Reality suddenly seems to mimic fiction when she discovers not only an apartment advertised for rent, but also a man prostrate in a corner who seems to be waiting for her. Hoping for the same torrid embrace as in the film, she discovers that he is in fact preoccupied only by the apartment's defects. Attempting to embark on a passionate affair, she learns that the man suffers from libido problems.