Louis Miliac is a good husband and a well-known hematologist. Yet, with 50 staring him in the face, the contrast between his teenaged son’s virility and his own leads him to face some home truths. Suddenly, his existence seems empty. He runs away from home, cutting himself off from the world, and, in the solitude of his pseudo-bachelorhood, he crafts the tale of a person who puts his own desires first. He makes up a life story for the man whom he watches at his window every night.
As he sinks further into this other character’s life, coincidences with his own wounds rise to the surface. Those of a past erased by his relatives the better to avoid the tragedies played out at Auschwitz. Documents in hand, Louis decides to retrace the tale of his own origins, and finds out that his family changed their name after World War II. That sheds a new light on things. Still using the fiction of a man who never compromises about what he wants as a crutch, he emerges from his torpor and goes back to his family. The fictional man gradually disappears, and Louis finally begins to emerge.