Arriving for the school celebration, parents go to extreme lengths to iron out all the wrinkles from their boisterous children. They find they are helped in this by the rigidly strict dance teacher. The domineering commands of the lumbering teacher who cannot bear clatter of any sort and the hammering bars of the piano deconstruct the children and uniformize them in accordance with the ideal of adults: first they turn into oafish garden gnomes, then motionless mushrooms, graceful swans, and finally bounding deer.
In a French seaside town, at a boarding house for civil servants recovering from surgery and maladies, the six male residents' lives change dramatically when two women arrive: Catherine, lively, sexually liberated, willing to kiss, dance, and sleep with the men, and Leonie, reserved, formal, conservative.
Paul, a former womanizer, marries the head of the medical department's "unattractive" daughter Christine because he thinks attractive women can't be trusted and make poor wives.
