The film is set in a very remote corner of France. Fifty-year-old Christian Bodin is about to get married to Claudine, the canteen worker at the village school. He lives under the rule of his mother Maria, an 82-year-old stubborn and short-tempered countrywoman. She is a bitch with a tender heart, scathing in her comments and quick with her hands. A team of journalists who have come to film during the ten days before the marriage find themselves plunged into the "bowels" of country life. The deep, deep countryside that remains very much alive... Christian and Maria Bodin are proof of that.