When she finds two old notebooks in a forgotten box, Marguerite Duras remembers her past and the unbearable pain of waiting. In the 1944 Nazi-occupied France, the young and brilliant author is an active Resistance member with her husband Robert Antelme. When he is deported by the Gestapo, she throws herself into a desperate struggle to get him back. She develops a chilling relationship with local Vichy collaborator Rabier and takes terrible risks to save Robert, playing a cat-and-mouse game of unpredictable meetings all over Paris. Does he really want to help her? Or is he trying to dig up information about the anti-Nazi underground movement? Finally the war ends and camp victims return, an excruciating period for her, a long and silent agony after the chaos of the Liberation of Paris. But she continues to wait, bound to the torment of absence even beyond hope.