Suzanne is about forty years old, a doctor’s wife and mother of two teenagers living in the south of France. Her idle bourgeois lifestyle gets her down and she decides to go back to work as a physiotherapist, a job she trained for but quit in order to bring up her children. Her husband agrees to fix up a consulting room for her in their backyard. The man in charge of the building work is Ivan, an odd job man who has been to prison. When he and Suzanne meet, the mutual attraction is sudden and violent. Suzanne decides to give up everything and live this all-engulfing passion to the full.