Antoine, a professor of Greek, and Lise, a police inspector, honeymoon in Greece. There they meet a young couple, Charles, an archaeologist, and Agnes, a dishy flirt. Charles unearths the lovely buttocks of a classical statue and is determined to donate it to the Louvre. Agnes wants to sell it and gets a handsome local sailor to take it for an appraisal. When the sailor is murdered, the police suspect Charles and arrest Antoine as his accomplice. Lise swings into action, but before she can clear the men, Agnes springs them from jail, and now Lise must help them elude the police, find the real murderer, and recover the statue fragment. More art goes missing. What is the statue's secret?

Giannis is a subversive young man who rebels against any social institution or authority. Unemployed by conviction, he cohabits with his German friend Ilze, who supports him, helps his arrogant uncle , a fallen aristocrat, with his drug smuggling, and becomes friends with a Pontian Turk, Mustapha. The latter has entered Greece illegally and follows Giannis to Athens, hoping to find his Greek grandmother, who is none other than Giannis' grandmother as well. Mustapha steals the hearty of Ilze, whom he entertains with tales of his exploits, but the uncle turns them over to the police, and so they are truly in a tight squeeze. They get out of doing time, despite it all, and leave for Turkey, but they stray into Albania, where they are arrested and sentenced to manual labor.

A janitor of the Municipality of Athens, determined to give his six-year-old son the future he himself was denied, enrolls him in a private school. But his chase of the “Greek dream” turns into a tragicomic spiral of conflicts, leading to a bitter revelation: perhaps his illusions were all he truly had.