The idyllic farm in Quebec's Eastern Townships belongs to the family of Melanie (Susan Sarandon), who as a child was interned at Drancy, a transit camp just outside Paris run by the Vichy government. It is 1985 and the long relationship between Melanie and her philandering academic husband David (Christopher Plummer) is more a stalemate than a marriage. Their grown son Benjamin (Roy Dupuis) is stranded between them.

David, played with late-in-life gusto by Plummer, is not interested in the survivor experience. In fact, for a historian, he's curiously uninterested in the past. ("No tragic aura!" he says briskly. "Forget it. Move on!") This hard line has been honed by years of marriage to the damaged Melanie. He is never allowed to suffer, David complains. Any troubles he could muster would inevitably seem trivial against the horrific childhood of his wife.