A young French woman travels to South America for a job offer and ends up a prisoner in a slave camp for women by a sadistic gangster.

At the end of the 19th century, during a ball in Joinville, on the outskirts of Paris, Georges, a former delinquent working as a carpenter, meets Marie, a young woman connected to a criminal gang.

Hopes and love and ambitions and friendship in a group of young jazz-loving Parisians.