Some People without Importance: Clothilde is a waitress at a wayside cafe, gas station and lodge, enduring boredom in the middle of nowhere by a truck route. She is disenfranchised by her family because of a former lover who has now dumped her anyway. She puts up with cafe patrons who can be offensive and inappropriate. Jean is a truckdriver working long hours, spending more time away from home than at it. "Home" is a cramped noisy apartment in Paris with his understandably-discontented and incessantly-ironing wife, precocious teenaged daughter, and two younger sons. Clothilde and Jean know each other from the cafe and Clothilde hitches a ride to see her mother in Bordeaux. The two become lovers. In the days before the pill, women's liberation, legal abortion, and improved working conditions this leads to heartbreak and disaster.