The story of an introverted young girl just reaching adulthood who takes a liking to an older woman she meets at a party and determines to match her off with her father, despite the latter's already having a lover of his own.

Joey Wellman, an American cartoonist from Cleveland now largely forgotten at home, visits France with his partner Lena to attend an exhibition in Paris about the comic strip (bande dessinée) which features his work. He also hopes to be reconciled with his daughter Elsie who has been a student in Paris for two years, in flight from the American culture of which she sees her father as a typical example. Elsie is naively infatuated with French literature, and is trying to secure an introduction to the brilliant university professor Christian Gauthier, an expert on Flaubert but also an enthusiast for comic books. The meeting of father and daughter goes badly, but Elsie is persuaded to join Joey and Lena for the weekend at the country house of Gauthier's mother, Isabelle. During a comic-themed masquerade party, all of the characters are made to reconsider their present and past relationships.

Like every provincial girl arriving in Paris, Charlotte gets off the train with one idea in mind: to have fun, to flirt, to find a guy at all costs. But Charlotte is unaware of the two handicaps she carries with her. First: Charlotte is not a fashion cover. Second: Charlotte is chronically unlucky. She attracts disasters better than a lightning rod attracts lightning... Operation Flirt is on! Charlotte's first experiences of love are catastrophic: all her stratagems end in disaster! Fortunately, Charlotte has more than one trick up her sleeve.

In this film that sends up the foibles of filmmaking, a standard crew of actors, stage-hands, director, writers, producers, and others are gathered for the filming of a 45-second automobile commercial. Each role embodies an archetype (the harried director who has a deadline to meet, the Scrooge production manager who has a budget to meet, and the writers who are above these mundane concerns), and these personalities drive the working actors over the edge until they decide to lock them up and do their own thing -- happiness can be just around the corner if you are in the driver's seat. Hopefully, the actors will be able to bow out before the police catch on to the situation.

An Italian lumberjack named Giovanni falls in love with a girl named Louise. What starts off as a whirlwind romance devolves Louise becoming a prisoner of passion.