Failed philosophy student Max de Kool is a cab driver stationed in front of the Pantheon in Paris. In his perfectly maintained black DS sedan, an old-fashioned car famed for its hydro-pneumatic suspension, he is waiting for something. But what? An adored professor who disappeared without warning, Oscar von Balthazar is back. He’s looking for a taxi to launch his final assault on the Sorbonne and on a withered France that has lost its taste for eloquence, concepts and hydro-pneumatic suspension.  And soon our two heroes have embarked on a voyage across Europe, a quest for the sublime and a V-7 high-pressure piston pump. On the way, they will resolve several thorny issues, like the Immaculate Conception and the importance of the placenta for thinking.

Like Candide or Zadig, this philosophical road movie goes wildly off the map, skidding us into improbable lands where, under Voltaire and French satirist Coluche’s patronage, a dialogue is established between the genius and the clown, the thinker and the idiot, the metaphysical count and the mileage counter.