Yacine lives with his brother Jamel in a cramped Parisian apartment. He works as a motorcycle courier, although he is also a brilliant political science student. When a delivery job takes him to the home of his professor Richard Artaud, his life is thrown off course. Both the professor and his wife, an actress, show an extraordinary, if disturbingly paternalistic interest in him. Shortly thereafter, the professor suddenly dies and Yacine makes a strange confession to Eléonore: "I am not dead"
