Plot summary

While traveling through Europe, American painter Jeff Farrell makes an unexpected extended stay in Saint-Jérôme, close to the Camargue tidal flats in the Provence region of France. He is a man that easily falls in and out of love, and his stay in Saint-Jérôme is to ditch his privileged girlfriend Grace, with whom he was traveling, as he has now fallen out-of-love with her. He is immediately attracted to Annette Beynat, the 18-year-old waitress at the bar and pensione where he's staying, and is just as easily seduced by her stepmother Eve whose incarcerated husband owns the establishments. In the course of their relationship, Jeff and Eve fall in love. Eve's husband Georges Beynat has been in an insane asylum for four years since he brutally killed a man who raped Annette on her way home from school. Eve knows that Georges is not insane and is planning to escape rather than be sent to prison if his true mental state would be discovered. Eve wants Jeff to help on the outside portion of the escape so that her and Georges' life can truly be over in settling their affairs, they who will sell the establishment splitting the proceeds with Georges subsequently to "disappear" from from Saint-Jérôme with Annette, and she and would be able to ride off blissfully into the proverbial sunset. The escape does not occur quite according to plan, and places Jeff's life at risk because of one of the other players' grand scheme for his/her own other end goal.—Huggo