AllMovie

This unusual, French-language period outing unfolds at a boarding school in 1950s Belgium, where 17-year-old student Laurent Matagne (Milan Mauger) still recoils from the pain of his father's disappearance during a 1940 air raid. The memory of the loss has haunted Laurent for years; then, in the midst of boarding school, a mysterious newcomer turns up in the form of Vapeur (French screen veteran Thierry Lhermitte of The Dinner Game), a wondrous professor who enchants all of the students with his enthusiasm, and even inspires Laurent to become a novelist. But the story doesn't end there; something about Vapeur strikes Laurent as distinctly familiar, and he begins to suspect that Vapeur is in fact his father. Matagne teams up with his friend Boulette (Benoit Cauden) to find out definitively; meanwhile, the young man also begins to author his first novel.