[3] The story concerns a middle-aged brother and sister who resume their fragile relationship when they are forced to care for their ailing mother.

Berthe, an elderly widow, is forced by her declining health to close the French farmhouse where she has spent much of her life.

She moves in with her daughter Émilie and son-in-law Bruno, who share a legal practice and have two grown children: Anne, a law student, and Lucien, who was adopted.

Worried about her mother's physical and mental health, Émilie pays a visit to her unmarried younger brother, Antoine, a neurosurgeon.

On Christmas Eve, Antoine arrives at his sister's home as Émilie, Bruno and Anne are leaving for midnight mass.

As he wanders through the house looking for his mother, he surprises Lucien, who works at a nightclub in town, making out with Khadija, Émilie and Bruno's Moroccan secretary, who has been invited to spend Christmas with the family.

Dinner is lively, but after the youngsters leave for Lucien's room, tempers flare between Bruno and Antoine and they exchange blows.

Feeling guilty, Antoine makes a halfhearted attempt to commit suicide, jumping from the balcony of his apartment and breaking a leg.

After the funeral, Antoine, Émilie, Bruno, Lucien, Anne and Khadija meet at the house in Blagnac and have breakfast outdoors.

My Favorite Season is based on an original screenplay by director André Téchiné that he and the scriptwriter and actor Pascal Bonitzer adapted for the screen.

For the main roles Téchiné cast Deneuve and Auteuil; it was their third collaboration, having worked together in Gérard Pirès's crime drama L'Agression (Act of Aggression) (1975) and Claude Lelouch's Us Two (À nous deux) (1979).

[5] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called My Favorite season "One of those intriguing films that functions without a plot, and uses instead an intense curiosity about its characters".

In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote that the film "finds the director probing believable troubles with honesty, intelligence and tact...Téchiné echoes the emotional fearlessness of a Bergman or Cassavetes in trying to capture the difficult, unruly essence of his characters' inner lives."