Jean Cocteau's adaptation of his own "vaudeville tragedy," written ten years earlier, was filmed with the original stage cast and was considered by Cocteau to be his most perfect cinematic work. The story of a middle-class family neurotically destroying each other with over-involved love and tender cruelty, the film is set almost entirely within the confines of two apartments: the cluttered home of the terrible parents, Sophie and Georges, and their son Michel; and the tidy, airy apartment of Madeline, the girl Michel wants to marry. The marriage is opposed by the parents, a suicidally possessive mother and her philandering husband whose mistress Madeline is revealed to be, and by an aunt, secretly in love with Georges. Like many of Cocteau's creations, the film has an aura of both satire and ancient tragedy.