Canicule

The dog days of 1983. The bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut. Ronald Reagan and Yuri Andropov, dancing into the sunset. Hess, Ascher and Wolf are orphans chance has brought together in a small Baltic seaside town. Twenty years on, Hess, a down-on-his-luck screenwriter, finds himself in the Mediterranean, drinking to forget a wasted marriage. Wolf, haunted by his father's murder, is drawn into the nebulous world of international terrorism. When Ascher, a failed artist, commits suicide, all the stakes are changed. Or are they? In the present, a sudden random act of violence brings two women together in mutual need and self-discovery. As the destinies of its protagonists intertwine, a story unfolds of love and betrayal in a time of failed ideology and moral crisis. With the Cold War, sex and punk rock throbbing in the background, Hess must confront his past, seeking to salvage dignity from defeat. By turns cinematic, hard-boiled, sensual, Canicule continues Armand's exploration of the underside of the human condition.--Amazon.com.