Max Mollerup is a Danish journalist, working for his newspaper in Paris during the turbulent sixties. He has a comfortable apartment, a car and all the other conveniences of modern urban life. However, he is also chronically insecure, incapable of doing or saying the right thing at the right time. In an age which exuded cool assurance and self-confidence, Mollerup is a loner who, unsuccessful with women, resorts to prostitutes. His one attempt at a serious relationship soon disappears beneath a slough of uninterest. To make matters worse, someone else wants his job, and his most successful book has just been exposed as a work of plagiarism. Then his mother comes to stay: an aging Danish film star from the 1930s, she is awful to him and he is in turn brutal to her.