François (Thierry Lhermitte) has convinced his wife and nearly everyone else that he is a pleasant, downtrodden civil servant who has been immured in a dead-end job. In reality, he is a very competent secret operative for the government.
Meanwhile, Helene (Miou-Miou), the mother of his two children, has grown bored with her dull husband and is considering whether or not she should have an affair with an attractively sleazy used-car salesman who has been feeding her his standard seduction line: that he's a secret agent (which, in his case, is a lie).
When François discovers this, he concocts a plan to teach his wife a lesson, which grows unexpectedly complicated when the two of them stumble across an international arms-smuggling cartel.