An adult woman named France walks down a road toward
Douala in
Cameroon. She is picked up by William J. Park, an
African American who has moved to Africa and is driving to
Limbe with his son. As they ride, France's mind drifts and we see her as a young girl in
Mindif in the northern part of
French Cameroon in 1957, where her father was a colonial administrator for the
French Empire. The story is told through the eyes of young France, showing her friendship with the "houseboy," Protée, as well as the sexual tension between Protée and her mother, Aimée. The conflict of the film comes from the discomfort created as France and her mother attempt to move past the established boundaries between themselves and the native Africans. This is brought to a head through Luc Segalen, a Western drifter who stays with the Dalens family after a small aircraft crashes nearby. He acknowledges Aimée's attraction to Protée in the presence of other black servants. This later results in a fight between Luc and Protée, which Protée wins. During the fight, Aimée sits nearby, unseen by the two. She attempts to seduce Protée after Luc has left but he rejects her advance. Aimée consequently asks her husband to remove him from the house. Protée is moved from his in-house job to working outdoors in the garage as a mechanic. Towards the end of the film, France's father reveals a central theme of the film as he explains to her what the
horizon is. He tells her that it is a line that is there but not there, a symbol for the boundaries that exist in the country between rich and poor, master and servant, white and black, coloniser and colonised, male and female; a line that is always visible but impossible to approach or pass. ==Cast==