Lucienne (Stphane Audran) lives a loveless but conveniently comfortable marriage to a provincial town s ambitious mayor Paul Delamare (Claude Piplu), who seems more interested in a lucrative but corrupt land deal than he does in anything other than the most basic trappings of family life. Unsurprisingly, Lucienne spices things up with a passionate affair with Pierre Maury (Michel Piccoli), who needs a similar distraction from his bed-ridden wife. But when Delamare appoints Maury as his deputy, the latter s relationship with Lucienne, already under constant threat of exposure thanks to the need to meet in semi-public places, becomes far more potentially damaging - especially when people start dying in mysterious and politically awkward circumstances. As ever with Claude Chabrol, it s the complex psychological interplay between the three main characters (and Lucienne s teenage daughter, a silent witness to more than she was supposed to see) that makes his film so riveting.