Directing
Stop-motion photography blends with extreme slow-motion in Clair's first and most dada film, composed of a series of zany, interconnected scenes. We witness a rooftop chess match between Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, a hearse pulled by a camel (and chased by its pallbearers) and a dizzying roller coaster finale. A film of contradictions and agreements.
The film recounts the life of a young member of parliament who joins the Freemasons in order to relaunch his career. He thus learns of how the Freemasons are conspiring with the Jews and the Anglo-American nations to encourage France into a war against Germany.
Soon after Marius's departure, Fanny learns that she is pregnant with his child, to the disappointment of her mother and of Marius's father, César. To secure a better life for her unborn child, she accepts a marriage proposal from the aging widower Honoré Panisse.
When the commander of a cruiser ,which sank in a confrontation,is tried for negligence, will the wife speak up in his defense? Unknown to him, she was trapped in the cabin below with her former lover, a subordinate officer.
Count Hubert de Latour Latour is the lover of the Duchess de Maulévrier. The day he is surprised by the Duke in the company of his wife and... in a rather compromising situation, Hubert resorts to a subterfuge, claiming that he has come to see the Duchess to seek support to be elected at the Institut de France, whose chairman is precisely her husband. The latter takes him at his word and Hubert becomes... a member of the French Academy! Which just shows that everything leads to everything.
Baron Arnold, a businessman, takes his young wife to Africa where he instructs her to seduce Captain Olivier, an intelligence officer. But Olivier illuminates the baroness on the unsavory activities of her husband as a weapons dealer and entrepreneur of revolutions.
A chamber pot manufacturer tries to impress a military official while his wife desperately tries to force their constipated young son to take a laxative, leading to chaos.
