Eve is an emergency medical technician who falls in love with Damien (Sagamore Stévenin), a handsome and caring man who runs a neighborhood bar in the Belgian countryside. When Damien and Eve become a couple, she joins him in looking after the bar and becomes friendly with the regular customers, but things take an unexpected turn when Eve is in a serious auto accident. While Eve walks away with no serious physical injuries, she's emotionally ravaged by the experience, and develops a severe speech impediment. Eve's new stutter makes it hard for her to communicate with Damien and she becomes the butt of jokes from the customers. Eve is increasingly isolated and Damien takes up with another woman until Eve retaliates by trapping him in their home and forces him to re-establish the building blocks of their relationship, starting with their sexual communication. Meanwhile, Eve's struggle to speak is contrasted with one of the tavern's annual events, an animal calling contest.

Jan Bucquoy narrates the story of his sexual life to age 28, imagining his conception (parents drunk, the encounter lasting ten seconds) and reporting his first orgasm (at the hands of Eddy, in a beach-side caravan, as they watch Laurel and Hardy), his comparative experiences with girls, and his move from Harelbeck to Brussels. There he meets Greta, bartender at a Bohemian cafe, who teaches him the Kama Sutra, the naked Esther, who reads him stories, and Thérèse, his wife for three years. They split after two children; he moves to a small flat, writes pornography to pay the bills, works sporadically on a novel, espouses anarchism, and meets more women. His self-confidence grows.