Liesel Landauer and her friend Hana are linked by a lifelong relationship and an exceptional house built by the architect Von Abt for Liesel and her husband Viktor in Czechoslovakia in the early 1930s.
The Crawley family goes on a grand journey to the south of France to uncover the mystery of the dowager countess's newly inherited villa. Meanwhile, a Hollywood director seeks to film his latest production at Downton.
A philistine in the art film business, Jeremy Prokosch is a producer unhappy with the work of his director. Prokosch has hired Fritz Lang to direct an adaptation of "The Odyssey," but when it seems that the legendary filmmaker is making a picture destined to bomb at the box office, he brings in a screenwriter to energize the script. The professional intersects with the personal when a rift develops between the writer and his wife.
The film consists of a series of tightly interlinked vignettes, the most sustained of which details the story of a man and a woman who are passionately in love. Their attempts to consummate their passion are constantly thwarted, by their families, by the Church and bourgeois society in general.