When their regal matriarch falls ill, the troubled Vuillard family come together for a hesitant Christmastime reunion. Among them is rebellious ne'er-do-well Henri and the uptight Elizabeth. Together under the same roof for the first time in many years, their intricate, long denied resentments and yearnings emerge again.
Emmanuel Brémont, a ten-year-old boy, suffers day after day the destructive madness of his mother. The young woman, a cashier in a supermarket, hates her son and does not hesitate to tell him. One Friday evening, Madame Brémont decides to go for a weekend. Emmanuel, on the other hand, will be waiting for his mother in the apartment, locked in double turn in the kitchen cupboard.
The film relates the painful ending of a love story binding an over-30-year-old woman and a North African, and the beginning and end of a relationship she also has with an “established” journalist. The stories illustrate the absolute claim of a woman who can understand love only in terms of life and death, an attitude that generally makes love appear dramatic, but at least burning and flickering, like the flame that glows in her heart.