In 1920s Marseille, Georges Sarret, a middle-aged lawyer, is presented with a military medal in a pompous ceremony as a tinny municipal band plays. A strikingly beautiful nurse-attendant wheels a rich, elderly lady to the ceremony in a bath-chair. As her eyes meet Sarret’s, lingering and speculative, she fails to notice the old lady has slipped down in the chair, dead. The nurse, Philomena Schmidt, Romy Schneider, is an unemployed German who soon becomes entangled with Sarret. She beds him after helping arrange a marriage between her and an older man so she can stay in France. After the wedding, Sarret also beds her sister Catherine, and a lustful ménage à trois develops between the trio.
The three embark on a career of insurance fraud. Catherine marries an elderly man called Deltreuil, while Sarret bribes Chambon, a dubious priest, to impersonate Deltreuil at the medical exam, and the gang—including Chambon’s mistress Noemie Andréa Ferréol—pulls off highly profitable schemes. Sarret decides to get rid of Chambon and Noémie, whom he shoots at a villa near Aix-en-Provence rented for the purpose. Sarret has already bought carboys of sulphuric acid, and with the sisters’ help, the dead bodies are disposed of in two baths upstairs, and the ghastly, gooey residue is painstakingly ladled and bucketed into a corner of the villa’s garden. This prolonged scene is the film’s grisly comic set-piece, a starkly dark moment that lingers in the memory.
Appropriating Chambon’s assets, the trio share the loot, and Catherine departs for Paris, while Philomena returns to Sarret in Marseilles. When Catherine rejoins them—and with the money running low in the early 1930s—they embark on new swindles by befriending and insuring patients in a tuberculosis hospital. With Philomena posing as a charitable Lady Bountiful and Catherine as the maid, they persuade the hospital nuns to release a terminally ill young patient, Magali Herbin, into their care, where they pamper her with luxuries, casinos, and high living.
Magali and Catherine begin an affair, adding another layer to the web of deception. Then, as Sarret and Philomena dance, Catherine’s body suddenly falls dead from an upper window. Distraught, Philomena attacks Sarret while Magali looks on, confused by the chaos around her. At Catherine’s elaborate funeral procession, Sarret proposes to Philomena, and the film ends abruptly with their wedding on the Mairie steps, attended only by Magali and the photographer, deliberately echoing the wedding photos that had appeared earlier in the film. The finale leaves a lingering sense of fate and irony over the trio’s criminal ascent and its chilling, unresolved aftermath.
This retelling preserves the film’s tonal shifts—from brittle farce to grim tragedy—while highlighting the characters’ entanglements and the escalating schemes that drive the story forward.
