Forty-something Pierre is serving a fourteen year prison sentence. His mother, who is approaching eighty, visits him every week. Suzanne, Pierre’s current wife, has moved on since he was sent away. Each character gives us a frank account of a period in their lives that seems suspended in time by the fragile connection between life on the inside and the world outside. Their destinies are linked by crime, guilt and loneliness, and like casualties of love and desire, they are dying to stick their heads above the water and breathe the air of life.

Living somewhere in present-day Quebec, Boris Malinowski has achieved all his goals. A freethinker, open-minded and proud, he also displays a certain arrogance when it comes to his successes. For some time now, his wife Béatrice, a Canadian government minister, has been bedridden, suffering from a mysterious depression. To escape from his wife’s agony, Boris begins a relationship with a colleague, Helga, and gets close to Klara, a young woman who works as a maid in Boris’s home. The sudden appearance of a stranger in his life forces Boris to come face-to-face with the world, with everything he takes for granted, with all his certainties.

Forty-something Pierre is serving a fourteen year prison sentence. His mother, who is approaching eighty, visits him every week. Suzanne, Pierre’s current wife, has moved on since he was sent away. Each character gives us a frank account of a period in their lives that seems suspended in time by the fragile connection between life on the inside and the world outside. Their destinies are linked by crime, guilt and loneliness, and like casualties of love and desire, they are dying to stick their heads above the water and breathe the air of life.