Jean, nicknamed Brasse-Bouillon, and his brother Ferdinand live with their paternal grandmother, who is responsible for their upbringing. But when their parents returned from Japan, they settled in Belle-Angerie and resumed their role with the children, while their grandmother had to leave for cousins. The boys soon come up against the contempt of their mother, Marthe. Faced with this shrew, whom he nicknamed "Folcoche" (a contraction of "madwoman" and "pig"), Jean decided to join the resistance.

After his father is killed in a plane crash, Bart Cordell returns back home to France to claim his inheritance: to lead the industrial empire his father built. But when a prostitute tries to set him up for a drug smuggling charge, he is forced to accept that his father may have been assassinated and that the killers are out to get him as well...

Directed by French author Geroges Perec, Les Lieux d'une fugue is an autobiographical account of the writer's experience of running away from his aunt's house at age 11. As much a meditation on the streets of Paris as it is personal narrative, Les Lieux d'une fugue examines how Perec's verbal games play out alongside a movie camera.