Nathalie Adler is on a mission for the EU in Sicily. She organizes the next visit of Macron and Merkel to a migrant camp. Their presence has a high symbolic value to show that everything is under control. But who still wants to believe in this European family on the verge of a nervous breakdown? Probably not Albert, Nathalie's son, an NGO activist who arrives without warning. He, moreover, no longer believes in his mother.
After long years spent in exile in Paris, Lyubov, a strange and elusive woman, returns to her ancestral estate, about to be sold to pay off the family’s debts. As the centre around which the play revolves, forever oscillating between tragedy and comedy, this maternal figure, this mater dolorosa, played by Isabelle Huppert, returns to a family unsettled by the future of the estate, and more largely, by that of this world she left behind. Modern society, with its social changes, is right around the corner, noisily announcing its arrival.