"I was at Cannes for Passe Montagne, and a friend of mine, Pierre Edelman, who took me for some kind of cowboy from the Jura, had decided to take me under his wing. At a party he introduced me to Monte Hellman, saying: 'Here is the French Monte Hellman.'" 
— Jean-François Stévenin

A driver and a mechanic travel through the American Southwest in a primer-grey 1955 Chevrolet, funded on winnings from illegal races with locals they encounter. Taciturn and reserved, they seem interested in almost nothing beyond the car. A young hitchhiker joins them, casually drifting in and out of their orbit as they continue east. Meeting the talkative driver of a new Pontiac GTO, they agree to a race across the country, with the winner taking the loser’s car. But almost as soon as it is declared, the contest seems to fade into the background, interrupted by detours, breakdowns and the opacity of relationships.

Stévenin later wrote that when he saw Monte Hellman’s masterpiece, he was "struck dumb by such rigour, by that rare kind of film you come out of changed for good." He felt he had found in Hellman the things he had unconsciously wanted to see in cinema; in particular, Hellman’s treatment of time, in which the organisation of a few minutes of film can give the sense of hours passing, became a crucial prototype for Stévenin’s own elliptical filmmaking. The two men became friends, taking car trips together during which, as Stévenin tells it, they didn’t say a word.