An upper middle-class French family celebrates a birthday in a restaurant. In one evening and during one meal, family history, tensions, collective and separate grudges, delights, and memories both clash and coalesce.
A shy maths graduate takes a holiday in Dinard before starting his first job. He hopes his sort-of girlfriend will join him, but soon strikes up a friendship with another girl working in town. She in turn introduces him to a further young lady who fancies him. Thus the quiet young lad finds he is having to do some tricky juggling in territory new to him.
Into the solitary life of middle-aged hitman, Victor Meynard, come two people: Antoine, a youth who becomes Victor's apprentice, and Renée, a bold thief Victor's been hired to kill because she cheated a mobster. When circumstances prevent Victor from killing her, the gangster sends two more teams to do it (and to dispatch Victor and Antoine). Victor decides to help Renée, and the unlikely trio ends up at his house with his temperamental mother; there, as they hide out, Victor's attraction to Renée grows, she discovers his vocation and fears he's going to kill her, and an ultimate showdown with their hunters is inevitable.