Bernard Aoust is a film professor at Berkeley, nearing retirement, who finds himself increasingly at odds with modern life. A Frenchman by birth, and an ideological child of May '68, Aoust is also obsessed with a long lost silent French film from 1923 and its obscure director, devoting his academic life to the film and banking on a new monograph to salvage his flagging career. After a series of unusual occurrences, the lost film plunges Aoust into an existential crisis..