Jean Pierre Leaud is Francois Marcorelle, a judge with a guilty complex. That's a funny begin, but this good movie goes far beyond the premise by amplifying the scale of the conflict to a wider perspective at higher levels. L'Affaire Marcorelle is basically a story about this poor guy who must manage how to get outside a trap: One night alone at the restaurant he meets a beautiful waitress, Agneska (Irène Jacob) and has a crush on her, Marcorelle kindly offers the girl to take her at her home where he later realizes she actually is a polish prostitute, then a confuse incident takes place and ends with a guy dead in the floor. So that's how he gets involved with the mafia trading with women in an intricate case which could demolish his reputation. This unfolds the plot, but the scheme is also a clever satire to politics, specially to foreign affairs in the old continent. Since the first time, Marcorelle decides to help the young illegal woman, and at the same time he must deal with his own family and take distance from a judicial bureaucrat with suspicious attitude (Mathieu Amalric) who doesn't even try to hide his prejudice on Marcorelle. As the antecedents get more and more complicated, the judge soon feels overwhelmed by the circumstances.