Antoine Sforza, a thirty-year-old young man, left his village ten years before in order to start a new life in the big city, but now that his father, a traveling grocer, is in hospital after a stroke, he more or less reluctantly accepts to come back to replace him in his daily rounds.

The tumultuous affair between a young man and a woman twenty-five years his senior.

With the ambition to start a boutique overseas but without the means to do so, Nathalie finds herself in a desperate situation, where she would do anything to acquire what she needs. Along with her boyfriend, Eric, and his friend Bruno, she concocts a plan where she seduces clueless men and accompanies them to their places, then allows Eric and Bruno to break in. But the three soon encounter trouble after one of their schemes ends in murder.

Henri Serin (Jean-Pierre Marielle), an umbrella salesman, leads a quiet life between his work, his family and his passion for painting. During his many business trips, Henri indulges in a few amorous escapades, which provide a welcome change from the tiresome daily routine his bigoted wife locks him into. One fine day, Henri decides to drop everything and live on love and fresh water. He ends up in Pont-Aven, where he meets Émile, a local painter imitating Gauguin, with whom he shares his drinking and other feminine attractions.

Anne and Lore, neighbors and best friends, barely into their teens, board at a convent school where they have taken a vow to sin and to serve Satan. Anne keeps a secret diary, they read a salacious novel, they get a classmate in trouble, they spy on the nuns, they set aside their communion wafers; they make a pact of devotion.

Marie, who was orphaned as a young girl, has a case of arrested development that makes her act younger than her age. One day she stops to look in a store window displaying various ornate dolls. Claude, the affluent, eccentric store owner, sees her and becomes infatuated which leads to her and him meeting and deciding to go and take a look at Claude personal doll collection at his house. Marie, unaware of Claude's bizarre obsession with dolls, decides to marry him.

Charlie, a forty-something looking for a job, meets two twenty-something girls, Ghislaine and Josiane, who are similarly unemployed. All three decide to take to the road selling oilcloth to pay their way. The harmony reigns within the group until the arrival of Tony, a seller of miniature cathedrals.

He’s lived for too long off his parents. It’s time for 40-year-old slacker Jacques to get by on his own. One-time gigolo and a borderline bum, he knows what he wants – to become rich and famous. He even has a business plan: tourism combined with cheap plastic surgery. Jacques moves in with his older sister, Monique, who manages an Emmaus village in the south west of France. And before long, the smooth-talking chancer has convinced a group of workers to pool their meagre funds and set out on a trip to a clinic in Bulgaria, where all their dreams of a brighter and more beautiful future will all come true. If only…

Four high school students in Paris question the education system and try to provoke a dialogue with their teachers. A portrait of the French youth after 1968.