Le corps de Marguerite Barnac est retrouvé dans l'étang de la propriété viticole de son beau-frère, Robert Barnac. La police locale penche pour la thèse de l'accident et cherche à classer rapidement le dossier pour ne pas perturber la tranquillité de la famille. Mais Gerry Morisson, un inspecteur américain en stage/mission dans le Médoc, écrivain à ses heures et amateur de jolies femmes, ne l'entend pas ainsi en dépit des consignes qui lui ont été données.

This film is one of director Claude Faraldo's explorations of assaults on conformity, which he explored more adventurously in his later film Themroc. In this film, a sensual young man begins his working life as a delivery boy. Later, as a married man, his father moves into the household. Everyone seems content when the father asks to occasionally have sex with his son's wife. Their contentment only increases when the father brings home a young street criminal, and they are able to add to the variety of their joinings. The son has become a truck driver by this time. One day after an accident, he abandons his truck on the street and he and his whole menage head south.

Themroc, a bachelor house painter living at home with his mother, leads a sad and colorless life. One day, after a run-in with his boss, he rebels. He wrecks his apartment, rejects every facet of bourgeois life, and begins acting like an urban, modern-day Neanderthal.