Leaving her husband Bertrand Lannier in Paris, bourgeois housewife Elizabeth journeys to Le Toquet for the summer holidays. There she is joined by young single mother Julie, hard-up neighbours Veró and Jérôme and their gangly teenage son Loïc. Too poor to stay in the same fancy hotel as Elizabeth, Jérôme has booked his family into a rundown caravan site, much to the chagrin of his status-conscious wife. Meanwhile, Loïc is eager to lose his virginity, Elizabeth is wondering whether she trusts the adulterous Bertrand, Julie is chasing after anything with a pulse and, on the other side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth's nymphomaniac daughter Emilie is partying with Kevin in Chicago, little realizing that he has embezzled money from her father's firm to pay for the trip.
With an acidic tetchiness, Blanc challenges us to find anything to like about its morally ugly but physically attractive characters. The tone of this scabrous comedy is unerringly caustic. After exploiting these holidaymakers' foibles for comic effect, he throws them into tragedy, before skilfully weaving the disparate narrative threads together for a finale that's as hesitant as it is satisfying.
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