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The portrait of an old man who decides to abandon his comfortable bourgeois way of life and live with a Bohemian couple. There he rediscovers his freedom to think and his joie de vivre.

An ode to liberated speech and to the power of words, "those one speaks to others, those one speaks in silence", Alain Tanner's third film is inspired by a poet and a poetic text which deeply affected him as a young director.

As he sets off for the countryside outside Geneva, taxi-driver Hector hears a gunshot and notices a shadowy figure slipping away from the scene. His next passenger is James, who needs to go to the airport to pick up his girlfriend Eva. Once they've done this, Hector suggests taking them to his home, where he lets Eva seduce him. James is later found dead in a field and Eva disappears. Hector wonders whether he was actually an unwitting witness to James' death the day before. Even if all this seems like a strange dream, it might well be reality.