The Lovers

Saddled with a dull husband and a foolish lover, a woman has an affair with a stranger. The bored and empty upper-class Jeanne Tournier lives in a manor with many servants in the countryside of Dijon with her husband Henri Tournier and their daughter Catherine. Henri is the editor of The Burgundy Monitor and has been married to Jeanne for eight years, but he does pay attention to his wife. Jeanne travels frequently to the house of her childhood friend Maggy Thiebaut-Leroy in Paris to meet her lover, the famous polo player Raoul Flores. One day, Henri suspects of the frequent trips of Jeanne to Paris and invites Maggy and Raoul Flores to have dinner and spend the weekend in his mansion. While driving back home from Paris, Jeanne car breaks down and the archaeologist Bernard Dubois-Lambert who is going to Montbard to visit a professor, gives a ride to Jeanne. Henri invites Bernard to stay with them. —Claudio Carvalho, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil Henri and Jeanne Tournier, married now for eight years, live outside the provincial town of Dijon, where Jeanne grew up, with their adolescent daughter, Catherine. Jeanne feels like a neglected wife as Henri spends more time on his job as the publisher of the Burgundy Monitor newspaper than he does with her. As such, she feels jealous of the exciting cosmopolitan life of her longtime best friend, married Maggy Thiebaut-Leroy, a flighty Paris socialite. Jeanne's visits to Paris become more and more frequent, to a point of being twice a month, as she has taken up with a renowned Paris polo player, Raoul Florès. Jeanne considers Raoul somewhat reckless in how open he is in their affair, she using Maggy, through who Jeanne and Raoul met, as their third in any outing to avoid any speculation of her infidelity. Jeanne admits she doesn't like the fact of other women chasing after Raoul when she's not around, he stating that he never succumbs to their advances. Jeanne suspects that Henri is having his own affair, with Hélène Cavalier, his secretary at the newspaper. Regardless of if Henri's affair is fact or just Jeanne's belief, Henri, knowing about Raoul, wants to have a showdown of sorts by Jeanne asking both Maggy and Raoul for a weekend in Dijon with them. If Jeanne has nothing to hide, she should have no problem with inviting her friends. That showdown, where the three in the triangle plan to work toward their own end goals, is affected by the last minute addition of a fifth to the weekend, young archaeologist Bernard Dubois-Lambert, who rescues Jeanne from her broken down car en route from Paris back to Dijon and who abhors the vacuous life of the Paris social scene. —Huggo