Bu-uel updated the Mirbeau novel about the decadent nineteenth century French upper class to 1928, when fascism was not the unspoken undercurrent but rather a movement of growing strength in France. The rural landscape is fittingly autumnal; the film ends on a lightning bolt. Against this backdrop Bu-uel unfolds his darkly humorous tale of a chambermaid, C?estine (Jeanne Moreau), who becomes the newest fetish for a family of perfectly ordinary perverts. One shoots butterlies ("I thought you liked butterflies"/ "Of course, I'd rather have missed"), another stalks little girls (and Jews and foreigners). Old P?re merely caresses the soles (or souls) of shoes. Celestine cunningly and ambiguously plays each passion against the other-very much like the French themselves and with similar results. The name chanted by the fascist automatons at film's end is none other than that of the Prefect of Police, Chiappe, who banned L'Age d'or in 1930.