Sophie, a quiet and shy maid working for an upper-class French family, finds a friend in the energetic and uncompromising postmaster Jeanne, who encourages her to stand up against her bourgeois employers.

In the sterile setting of a powerful multinational, a ruthless corporate executive and her ambitious protégée bare their claws in a vicious battle for supremacy.

Frédérique Letheil, who heads the research department of the Emmerson oil group, has sacrificed her private and sentimental life to her experiments. The management, which sees her work as a financial drain, has her unjustly dismissed by the group's general manager, Maxime Vergnaud. When the company realizes its mistake and the economic and ecological potential of Frédérique's research, it asks Maxime to bring her back at all costs.

In June 1940, in a village of Franche-Comté occupied by the Germans, five children decide to join the resistance in their own way, against the German invaders.

After returning from a long African exile, a sixty-year-old woman leaves her unfaithful husband and starts anew with her five-year-old granddaughter.