Hommage à François Truffaut

A young Parisian boy, Antoine Doinel, neglected by his derelict parents, skips school, sneaks into movies, runs away from home, steals things, and tries (disastrously) to return them. Like most kids, he gets into more trouble for things he thinks are right than for his actual trespasses. Unlike most kids, he gets whacked with the big stick. He inhabits a Paris of dingy flats, seedy arcades, abandoned factories, and workaday streets, a city that seems big and full of possibilities only to a child's eye.

Paris, in the 1900s: Jules, German, and Jim, French, two artist friends, are in love with the same woman, Catherine. It is Jules who marries Catherine. They are separated by war. They meet again in 1918. Catherine doesn't love Jules anymore and falls in love with Jim.

In Thiers, in the Puy de Dôme, a handful of children live the last weeks of the school year waiting impatiently for the holidays: Bruno, Patrick, Laurent, Mathieu or Franck, without forgetting Martine... They all live at their own pace and give a soul to this village where the two teachers, Melle Petit and M. Richet, try as best they can to capture their attention as the summer camp approaches.

Miss Lewly boarded in Halifax in 1863. There she looked for Lieutenant Pinson, with whom she was madly in love but who did not love her. He may tell her, but she continues to pursue him even though she knows he has a mistress. Miss Lewly is actually Adèle Hugo, the poet's second daughter. She tries at all costs to marry him, making Pinson's marriage to another woman fail. Adele's mother dies, and Pinson goes to the Bearded One, she follows him. Gathered by Mrs. Baa, who warns the Hugo family, she will be sent back to France and interned.

All Marion Steiner can think about is rehearsals for a new play she is staging at the Montmartre Theater, where she has taken over as director in place of her Jewish husband, who has disappeared. Everyone believes that Lucas Steiner has fled France, but he is, in fact, hiding in the basement of the theater.

Julien Vercel, director of a real estate agency, is suspected of a double murder: that of his wife, Marie-Christine, and her lover, Claude Massoulier. Circumstances being against him, Julien Vercel takes to the open sea in order to evade the police. His secretary, Barbara Becker, will lead the investigation and try to discover the truth. Her "objectivity" forbids her to exclude Julien from the list of culprits. In the course of her investigation, Barbara meets an upset movie cashier, a subornation client who wants to rent "a castle in the mountains with his feet in the water", a zealous lawyer, an overly curious photographer who is also her ex-husband, a Slavic swinger, a blonde typist who could be a rival, and above all a pugnacious police superintendent. During all this time, the corpses continue to fall...