Marie is a bereaved woman whose husband and teenage son have recently been killed in a car crash. Unable to get over her loss, Marie--a partner in a dress shop in Montreal--takes an ad in the paper: "Mother who has lost a son seeks a son who has lost a mother." Four young males respond to her plea from the heart: Alex, a sexually ambivalent performance artist whose into S&M--orphaned at the age of 12, he craves his mother's love; Martin, a schoolboy about the age of her dead son, who seems to be the victim of domestic violence; Victor, a well-off, vastly over-weight, self-conscious, computer geek who never leaves the studio of what was once upon a time his parents' palatial home; and finally there's Paul, a much older man who has serious sexual hang ups... married to a wife he despises and father of two children he abuses. Marie's journey toward finding a surrogate son, through these four men, becomes both complicated and traumatic--especially when it comes to Paul and Alex. She will endure these hardships in hopes of making some sort of peace with that which fate has dealt her.