Marcelle de Barthas is young French widow, who since her husband’s death some seven years previously, has lived a secluded life in her country house, with her four children. The eldest one, Emmy, is a beautiful and pure young girl of seventeen, who tentatively believes she has a calling to the religious life. The second child, Bertrand, aged fifteen, has been sent to England for an exchange holiday with a young English boy, Harry Fanning, and when the play opens, the French children are excitedly awaiting his arrival. Also living with the family is a French governess, and a tutor, Blaise Lebel. Lebel has a sombre power over the family, and it is the ‘intrusion’ of Harry that sets in motion in him a wave of resentment and fear.

An unhappily married woman struggles to break free from social pressures and her boring suburban setting.

Thérèse is living in a provincial town, unhappily married to Bernard, a dull, pompous man whose only interest is preserving his family name and property. They live in an isolated country mansion surrounded by servants. Early in her marriage her only comforts are her fondness for Bernard's pine-tree forest, which was her primary reason for marrying him, and her love for her sister-in-law and Bernard's half-sister, Anne. The movie recounts in flashback the circumstances that led to her being charged with poisoning her husband.

In the 1930s, in a village in Gironde, Guillou, a young boy in need of affection, nicknamed the Sagouin, unhappy and in need of affection, leads a life of anguish and sadness in a sinister castle. He exasperates his mother who sees in him only the hated reflection of a husband she only married to become a baroness. Thanks to the kindness of the village teacher, Guillou glimpses for a moment the existence of another world, of gentleness and tenderness.

Twenty years have passed. Thérèse lives alone in Paris. We exiled her there. She seems to be asking nothing more for life. She is sick and lives in slow motion. One day, we ring rue du Bac. It is Mary, her daughter, whom she sees so little. She is twenty years old now and comes to see her to escape her middle-class south-west. She is very in love with a boy, she expects from her mother a support, a freedom of point of view. His name is Murad. The arrival of her daughter awakens Therese with her reserve and torpor. It does not shock Mary, who is very busy with her love. Thérèse proposes to meet Mourad. She quickly understands that he is not willing to marry Mary but wants her without wanting to bond more deeply to her. It is she Therese, that the young man looks ... She wanted to help her daughter to be happy, a wish too official not to be suspicious. Here she is delivered to the power of her own seduction ...

Two brothers-in-law hate each other but, for business interests, they want their respective son and daughter to marry. The young fiancées are not in agreement, as the boy has a happy relationship with a woman, and the girl is in an isolation mood. A crime happens, and the relations amongst this sad family become even worse.

A doctor and his son fall in love for the same woman, who has lost her child.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a young man from the upper middle class tries to escape the constraints of his family.