Lily, a Chinese girl brought up in strict Chinese tradition, meets Tom, a painter living with his four models in Provence, France. Although Tom is secretly condemned by an incurable disease, the painter passes his love of life and dreams to this young woman. Unexpected events awake Lily's senses and enable her to leave her "good girl" life to discover the real meaning of life.

Paulette lives alone in a housing project in the Paris suburbs. With her meager pension, she can no longer make ends meet.

The day she turns 40, Marguerite Flora, a successful rep for a nuclear power company, begins receiving letters she'd sent to herself at age seven. The letters tell her what to do if her life hasn't turned out the way she thought it should, when she was living in poverty with her mother and brother in a small village in southern France. She decides to go back to her birthplace to get the lawyer to stop the letters, but also to visit her childhood sweetheart and her long-forgotten brother, in order to find peace within herself.