A small group of French students are studying Mao, trying to find out their position in the world and how to change the world to a Maoistic community using terrorism.

Two people, a Frenchman and a Jewish German woman, meet on a train while escaping the German army entering France.

In 1830s France, a virtuous widow falls for a self-destructive debauchee obsessed with death. Initial resistance gives way to a desperate and cynical romance.

The story of a donkey Balthazar as he is passed from owner to owner, some kind and some cruel but all with motivations beyond his understanding. Balthazar, whose life parallels that of his first keeper, Marie, is truly a beast of burden, suffering the sins of humankind. But despite his powerlessness, he accepts his fate nobly.

A wealthy Italian household is turned upside down when a handsome stranger arrives, seduces every family member and then disappears. Each has an epiphany of sorts, but none can figure out who the seductive visitor was or why he came.

A supposedly idyllic weekend trip to the countryside turns into a never-ending nightmare of traffic jams, revolution, cannibalism and murder as French bourgeois society starts to collapse under the weight of its own consumer preoccupations.

A strike at a French sausage factory contributes to the estrangement of a married filmmaker and his reporter wife.

Nina is a young, carefree actress who arrives in Paris searching for her big break. There, she finds drama both on- and offstage as she becomes involved with three men: a mild-mannered real-estate agent who offers her stability, a bad-boy actor who lives dangerously on the edge, and an intense theater director who casts her in a production of “Romeo and Juliet.” As opening night approaches, the emotional extremes of Nina’s love life fuel her art.

How couples unite, interact, separate, reunite or find other partners. The links in this chain begin with Christian and Nathalie, who are coworkers and friends. Christian discovers that his lover Francoise is having an affair, and Nathalie advises him to give his feelings some time to heal, about two years. Nathalie is angry that her lover Mark does not want to see her more often, while he is jealous of the men in her past. Meanwhile, Francoise finds out that her new lover is not that interested in her anymore, and after they split, she encounters him with someone else. As romance fluctuates like the lunar tides, the myth of one true love takes a beating.