Wisi is in trouble. He arrives in Bordeaux in the hope of finding a job and crosses paths with Marina, a humanitarian with a big heart. To get accommodation with her, he pretends to be undocumented. One evening, he meets Jérôme, himself on the street after the death of his mother.
Nora, 26, is a graduate and still lives with her parents. While Nora has no field experience, she finds herself in charge of a 19-year-old boy, accused of having murdered a girl from his residence. From her first police custody to the follow-up of the instruction, Nora discovers the cruelty of the world around her, in her intimate and professional life. Soon, carried away by the frenzy of her new life, she multiplies the errors.
Karim, 30, drives every night. One day at dawn, he drives his last client - a foreign artist, the same age than him. Karim feels irresistibly attracted towards this young man. What he feels will start questioning who he thought he was.
Nassim, a 16-year-old boy, is placed with a family in the suburbs following the death of his drug addict mother. But he refuses to integrate into the social setting that surrounds him. He invents another life for himself, similar to that of his mates at the big Parisian high school he goes to. There’s no reason for that to change. His two lives, his home life and his school life, must be kept separate at all costs.
Antoine Sforza, a thirty-year-old young man, left his village ten years before in order to start a new life in the big city, but now that his father, a traveling grocer, is in hospital after a stroke, he more or less reluctantly accepts to come back to replace him in his daily rounds.
Isabelle Nanty is a Paris concierge, four children to look after and a fifth in gestation with a loutish and uncaring husband who runs off with the girlfried of one of the lodgers in her building. This same lodger called Le Bison has rather strange hours and both he and Dorine ( the concierge ) get on each other's nerves because each makes noise at the "wrong" time for the other ! The fact that their respective mates have run off together nevertheless bring the two together and with Dorine's children getting very attached to Le Bison, there are the makings of an "idylle" between the two of them which the return of the two offending mates fails to break
After raising her daughter, one would think that Julie's life was rather full. However, she recently got an offer from the French consul to a mission in Pondicherry, India to teach her skills to Indians. She can only do this if she gets her high-school diploma, something she neglected to do earlier. The idea of this new post motivates her to rectify her youthful omission, and she goes back to school in Montparnasse. Just before classes are to start, her current boyfriend's condescending ways prove too much for her, and she breaks up with him, reacting to that by getting drunk. Thus, when she has to take the subway to school on the first day, being unfamiliar with the route and somewhat the worse for wear, she gets lost. Fortunately, she meets an elderly man, a retired musician for the Paris Opera, who is headed for the very same destination. The two form a relationship of mutual encouragement and support.
A provocative, seemingly absurd patchwork movie which sends a worthwhile message about hope against all odds, love, children and human understanding. Schoolgirl Victorine has an insane mother and an alcoholic father who can never find his way home in their maze of slum apartment blocks. Aggressive, sexually threatening boys of all ages are everywhere, and while the teacher eventually relents to a gang of adolescent rapists, Victorine gives herself to a rowdy gang of older layabouts, eventually winning the heart of burglar Paul.