It’s a murder story set in the small Breton fishing town of St. Malo. A young schoolgirl is found raped and murdered in the woods. The new female chief inspector Frédérique Lesage (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) makes her chief suspect the mentally fragile failed artist René Sterne (Jacques Gamblin), who was the girl’s private art teacher and the last known person to see her alive after she left his lesson. René’s devoted physical therapist wife Vivianne (Sandrine Bonnaire) supports him despite many of the locals withdrawing their children from his tutoring sessions. Vivianne soon begins a possible affair with the oily, self-important and vain TV journalist Desmot (Antoine De Caunes), the town’s celebrity and a real smoothie with the media. The chief inspector is also interested in Regis Marchal (Pierre Martot), René’s best friend and the plumber and small-time crook, who fences stolen goods and religious artifacts to among others Desmot; he does so because he needs the money to satisfy his young wife Anna (Adrienne Pauly), who also baby-sits for the chief inspector’s young daughter. There’s also a curious pair of elderly shopkeepers (Bulle Ogier & Noël Simsolo), who after a 100 minutes into the narrative become even more curious as we get filled in on these oddballs.