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.

The Saline Royale (Royal Saltworks) is a historical building at Arc-et-Senans eastern France,about 35 kilometers from Besançon. The architect was Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736-1806), whose career began under Louis the Fifteenth 's reign.This is the place where Pierre Kast,a former critic of the famous (or notorious ,depending on whom you ask) "cahiers du cinema" , locates his psychological drama dealing with the loves and times of privileged people ;his settings have always been his forte : the Royal Saltworks here , " Portugal in "vacances portugaises" , Brazil in " un animal doué de déraison" ,and mainly Easter Island in his most accessible film "les soleils de l'île de Pâques "....

If you expect pure Nouvelle Vague stuff ,this is exactly what you get : bourgeois people ,who have no problems to make both ends meet : they are in their desirable houses like in an ivory tower ,only concerned by their -insignificant - problems , les Salines -de -Chaux being like a fortress which cuts them from the world.

Sylvain ,a novelist who wrote a best-seller and since has been experimenting the writer's cramp ,lives with Geneviève , who , when she first appears ,holding a basket of vegetables ,asks herself what she is going to do today ;their neighbors are wealthy politicians :Jacques , nearing forty ,was once a prime minister (no less!) ,but sees time passing him by and longs for another life : ethnography , for instance , would allow him to go and study Easter Island (which the director would later use in his 1972 film);his numerous conquests (including Anne -Marie ,who seems to spend all her time horse-riding in the magnificent forest; a wasted Alexandra Stewart)do not satisfy him anymore .His wife Françoise is still ambitious and hard on the others (a typical NV female character who never had to earn her crust).

The well-read dialog is so sophisticated that the excellent actors (Daniel Gélin ,Pierre Vaneck ) have rather self-conscious manners ; the screenplay ,appallingly trite, (even the "ménage à trois" was not that original ;the very same year, Luis Bunuel ended his "Viridiana" that way), makes the viewer yawn his head off . It is the first time I have not liked Georges Delerue's score:his fanfare-like music is pompous and intrusive.

If you can relate to this kind of stuff ,there's more to enjoy in his "vacances portugaises " (1962) ;the subject is the same: wealthy people in a desirable mansion contemplating their navel ;and you will be treated to the delights of twelve people's sentimental problems.