Two brothers are fighting for a one girl attention...

A bored couple takes in a young man who turns their lives inside out.

Two enigmatic women separately arrive in Paris, both with a hidden but shared motive. As they navigate the city and their search progresses, various characters become entangled in a conflict, which increasingly comes to take a fantastical turn. These characters too, driven by their own desires, strive for their own goals in the struggle. From a Paris, drenched in an otherworldly ambiance, a tale of desire and power emerges through mystery and secrets.

The former famous painter Frenhofer lives quietly with his wife on a countryside residence in the French Provence. When the young artist Nicolas visits him with his girlfriend Marianne, Frenhofer decides to start again the work on a painting he long ago stopped: La Belle Noiseuse. And he wants Marianne as model.

Roberte, 40, resistant during the war, Calvinist and anticlerical, is deputy to the chamber and inspector of Censorship. She married Octave, an old Catholic aesthete, professor of canon law, whom she saves from impeachment for collaboration during the war. He submits his wife to a perverse custom: the laws of hospitality or prostitution of the wife by the husband.

Three penniless artists become friends in modern-day Paris: Rodolfo, an Albanian painter with no visa, Marcel, a playwright and magazine editor with no publisher, and Schaunard, a post-modernist composer of execrable noise.