França, 1935. Philippe (Yannick Renier) está apaixonado por Odile (Raphaëlle Agogué), uma bela mulher, e imediatamente decide casar-se com ela, apesar da relutância de seus pais. Eles preferiam para o seu filho único uma menina que fosse do mesmo "ambiente social" - Isabella (Agathe Bonitzer), por exemplo, que já conhecem desde a infância. Toda a família espera por um herdeiro, o que infelizmente não acontece. Odile abandona seu casamento para dedicar-se ao desenho, um talento que herdou de seu pai.
In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.
The film depicts events between the Fashoda crisis in 1898 and the 1904 signing of the Entente Cordiale creating an alliance between Britain and France and ending their historic rivalry. It was based on the book King Edward VII and His Times by André Maurois. It was made with an eye to its propaganda value, following the Munich Agreement of September 1938 and in anticipation of the outbreak of a Second World War which would test the bonds between Britain and France in a conflict with Nazi Germany.
