An anachronistic firefighter, a quotidian poet, and an expert soup-maker, Ducarmel also plays in a competitive basketball league. There’s only one problem with his hobbies: finding a babysitter to look after his daughter. Moreover, when he dozes off in the evening, he dreams… a little too forcefully. In his bizarre dream world, a beguiling blue book reigns, love looms, and he is the best basketball player of all time.

Montreal, December 31, 1933. Inside the storefront window of the grand Ogilvy store, a young worker watches passersby with envy. Tonight, she has nowhere to go. When the store closes, she finds herself outside admiring a party in a neighboring house. She notices a young man. In spite of the cold, she doesn’t move, looking at the young man, and she is softly swept away into a world of dreams.

David Wozniak is a perpetual adolescent who discovers that, as a sperm donor, he has fathered 533 children. He is advised that more than 100 of his offspring are trying to force the fertility clinic to reveal the true identity of "Starbuck," the pseudonym he used when donating his sperm. To make matters worse, his girlfriend Valérie is pregnant with his child, but doesn't feel that he is mature enough to be a father.

Rejeanne and Gilles are a married couple whose devastating setbacks--she is laid off from her job and he suffers a debilitating stroke--only begin to fester in the face of corporate greed and personal struggles when they attempt to start over in a new neighborhood.

Agathe, an asthmatic child, lives with her mother Thérèse, a melancholic artist.