Daniel Piron, a former left-wing journalist who has been reduced to hosting a TV show on traffic safety, has a chance encounter with Sacchi, a man who was the author of a school bus hijacking 25 years earlier. Sacchi had hoped his stunt would allow him to denounce social injustice on TV, but he was arrested before he could get on camera. Piron, for whom Sacchi has remained a revolutionary icon, has an inspiration: he'll find the protagonists of the earlier hostage-taking in order to make an ambitious new film on the evolution of society. Alas, Sacchi is no longer the revolutionary he was a generation ago. Piron must manipulate reality and he becomes the new hijacker in a reconstitution of events that goes terribly awry.