A Parisian police chief has an affair, but unbeknownst to him, the boyfriend of the woman he’s having an affair with is a bank robber planning a heist.

Wendy is the British guest of a French couple and the daughter of the man who saved the host's life during World War II. Living with the couple is their 20-year-old son and a 12-year-old nephew whose parents were killed in an automobile accident. The father and son both try to seduce the attractive guest. The young boy retreats into his own world and dreams of being taken back to Britain by Wendy in this romantic drama. The mother spends her time bleaching her hair and is seemingly uninterested in anything that goes on with her family at the beachfront villa. Meanwhile, Wendy and the younger boy develop a fondness for each other, while his aunt and uncle fail to understand his needs.

Paris, France, 1942, during the Nazi occupation. Robert Klein, a successful art dealer who benefits from the misfortunes of those who are ruthlessly persecuted, discovers by chance that there is another Robert Klein, apparently a Jewish man; someone with whom he could be mistakenly identified, something dangerous in such harsh times.

When French criminal Corey gets released from prison, he resolves to never return. He is quickly pulled back into the underworld, however, after a chance encounter with escaped murderer Vogel. Along with former policeman and current alcoholic Jansen, they plot an intricate jewel heist. All the while, quirky Police Commissioner Mattei, who was the one to lose custody of Vogel, is determined to find him.

Betrayed by an informant, Philippe Gerbier finds himself trapped in a torturous Nazi prison camp. Though Gerbier escapes to rejoin the Resistance in occupied Marseilles, France, and exacts his revenge on the informant, he must continue a quiet, seemingly endless battle against the Nazis in an atmosphere of tension, paranoia and distrust.

Complications abound in this French film, which tells the story of a filmmaker who is attempting to put his real life into a movie; his interactions with the people in the movie he is filming create reverberations in his "real" life, although the past remains unchanged. Among the complications is his growing regard for the woman who plays his cinematic wife. She may wind up replacing his actual wife in real life. One of the highlights of this film is the insight it gives into the actual mechanics of filmmaking.