Louis is a brooding loner who lives with two large white dogs in a forest near the French-Swiss border His estranged son Sidney lives with his wife in a village nearby Louis is carrying on an affair with the local pharmacist and carrying a torch for a beautiful, feral local dog breeder He suffers a mild heart attack, and buys a new heart on the black market Then he travels to South Korea, where he buys a boat and sails it to his former home, a dilapidated shack on a remote island south of Tahiti His dream is to find the son he sired decades earlier when he lived there However, once he is settled, his body begins to reject the alien heart