Anne is a theater director. She has separated from her husband and is moving house. She is dull, without desires. She meets Ben, a helpful neighbor and jobless actor. He looks at her with passionate eyes; she never wants to tie herself to a man again. But when she decides to stage Zola's “L'assommoir”, it is to him that she proposes the role of Coupeau, casting herself in the one of Gervaise. As the story unfolds, the boundary between real life and the play becomes increasingly blurred; Between readings and rehearsals, between research and study, reality fades into fiction, and the two seem to retrace exactly all the steps of Coupeau and Gervaise's story, all the way to ruin.