Director Max Ophuls demonstrates his unique storytelling skills in three tales about the limits of spiritual and physical pleasure: pleasure and youth, pleasure and death, and pleasure and purity. Featuring a cast of French stars -- including Danielle Darrieux, Jean Gabin and Simone Simon -- this film uses rustic countryside retreats, sumptuously designed ballrooms and urban bordellos of late 19th-century Parisian society as backdrops.