A flirtatious television weather reporter named Gabrielle is the object of two men’s affections in this colorful new film from popular filmmaker Claude Chabrol, who has directed more than 50 films over the course of his career. When Gabrielle meets a famous elderly novelist at a booksigning event in her mother’s Lyon shop and at an interview for her TV station, she sets her sights on him. Their brief amorous affair soon grows to become a dark fixation which drives Gabrielle’s handsome, spoiled young suitor, Paul, the heir to a pharmaceutical company, to madness. As the film progresses, the scheming protagonists and their families become more deeply obsessed, their relationships become increasingly humiliating and depraved, and the stakes of their games grow higher and higher. Chabrol uses black humor and accessible cinematic structure to skewer his stubborn, independent and self-absorbed characters. The story, inspired by the murder of architect Stanford White in 1906, begins as a playful, sexy triangle that turns darkly foreboding and dangerous, until it builds to a fever pitch with disastrous and melodramatic results.