In the carefree days before World War I, introverted Austrian author Jules strikes up a friendship with the exuberant Frenchman Jim and both men fall for the impulsive and beautiful Catherine.

Parisian everyman Antoine Doinel has married his sweetheart Christine Darbon, and the newlyweds have set up a cozy domestic life of selling flowers and giving violin lessons while Antoine fitfully works on his long-gestating novel. As Christine becomes pregnant with the couple's first child, Antoine finds himself enraptured with a young Japanese beauty. The complications change the course of their relationship forever.

In 1798, a feral boy is discovered outside the town of Aveyron, France. Diagnosed as mentally impaired, he is relegated to an asylum. A young doctor named Jean Itard becomes convinced that the boy has normal mental capacity, but that his development was hindered by lack of contact with society. He brings the boy home and begins an arduous attempt at education over several years.

In Laos, 1954, eight days before the french defeat in the Indochina war, the 317th platoon – four french soldiers and 41 laotian combatants – has been ordered to leave its outpost and to retreat for the plains of Diên Biên Phu, where the french army is getting stucked. Led by the inexperienced and idealistic sous-lieutenant Torrens, fresh out of the military academy, and by adjutant Willsdorf, a WWII veteran of the Werhmacht, the group must cross 150 kilometers of jungle. But dripping rainwater, hostile nature, and the Viêt-minh ambushes expose them to constant danger.

During her holiday in Brest, a young Parisian falls in love with a sailor. But autumn comes and the two lovers have to part. They write to each other. Will their love resist at a distance, each living his life, him in Brest with his friends, she in Paris who keeps waiting for him? An impossible love story and the cross-portrait of two cities, Paris and Brest, between the realism of the color images and the poetry infused by the sepia black and white images, lives to the rhythm of the nostalgia of the two lovers...