This film is an interesting mix of ideas from Goethe's 'Elective Affinities' ('Die Wahlverwandtschaften') and the French Enlightenment set in and around Ledoux's amazing Saline royale at Arc-et-Senans. The focus is on two couples and their relationships. One couple, the duke and his wife, live on their estate and are involved in its running as well as in politics. The other couple, a writer and his wife, have escaped life in Paris and have, improbably, made a home in part of the Saline royale. Two events set things in motion: the couples meet and the writer's wife finds that for the last ten months he hasn't written a word on his second book.

The film is predictably heavy on dialogue, but is also full of beautiful shots of beautiful people in the beautiful landscape, both built and natural. The music by Georges Delerue is a catchy but odd homage to early-Baroque.

The ending is as satisfying as an eighteenth-century novel's: the good are rewarded, the bad punished, and the two couples have realigned in surprising but highly satisfactory ways.