After five years of travelling abroad, Alex arrives back in Montreal. All he has with him are a back-pack and a slip of paper with an ex-girlfriend's address scrawled on it.

Her publisher forces Marianne to rewrite the manuscript of a novel she wrote and burned in a fit of anguish. Her obsession with her story where the characters she creates murder her own husband becomes overwhelming. She comes to believe he is leading a double life and she imagines the worst. As a matter of fact, her husband Robert is leading a double life: every day, at noon, for a year, he has locked himself up in a small hotel room to also write a novel.

Jo, a talented young art student from Quebec, attracts the attention of a mysterious European art dealer who buys her drawings. When she later learns that the works are being sold as newly discovered drawings by Vincent van Gogh, she sets out to uncover the truth—traveling first to Amsterdam and ultimately to 19th-century Arles to confront the painter himself.