In post-WWII Paris, a Cambodian student radical and French drifter play a dangerous game of lust and revenge. It is 1949, and young Etienne Legast is in trouble. Estranged from his pious Catholic family, having fled a messy love affair with an older man at the end of the war, he returns home to Paris for a funeral, only to find himself quick drawn into a deadly debt to a neighborhood gangster and an unexpected romance with Samphan, an orphaned Cambodian student radical. Though the two young men come from different worlds, they soon develop a bond that helps them transcend their respective tragedies - until revolutionary political intrigues and the Parisian underworld threaten to pull them under once more.