In 14th-century France, Aliénor breaks with the codes governing girls’ behavior and does as she wishes. The King of France grants her the hand of her childhood love, but her new husband deserts her immediately after the ceremony. Undeterred, she sets out after him, traveling to Siena to bring him back.
On a whim, the long-married Hélène decides to look up a former lover of hers. At his apartment, she is met by the man's grown son, Julien, who tells her that his father died just a few days before. Before long, she has become Julien's lover, but she is also increasingly becoming attached to the rather unlikely idea that Julien and she are genetically related. Meanwhile, her cardiologist husband cannot fathom her increasingly bizarre behavior. It is one thing to have an affair, even with a much younger man, but she seems to be edging ever-closer to the borderline between sanity and madness.
Silvia, who lives in a villa in the hills, has a quarrel with her husband and his friends and then goes away down to the city, where she has the bad luck of being attacked by a group of misfits. At her rescue is a photographer who, in turn, is in trouble for having witnessed a murder by the Chinese mafia...
A recently widowed American begins an anonymous sexual relationship with a young Parisian woman.