Roland and Corinne Durand are a
bourgeois couple. Each has a secret lover and conspires to murder the other. They drive to Corinne's parents' home in the country to secure her inheritance from her dying father, resolving to resort to murder if necessary. The trip becomes a chaotic journey through a French countryside populated by bizarre characters and punctuated by violent car accidents. After their own
Facel-Vega is destroyed in a collision, they wander through a series of vignettes involving
class struggle and figures from literature and history, such as
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just and
Emily Brontë. In a
metafictional touch, some scenes show the characters in the film being
self-aware such as a driver asking Roland after being flagged down, "Are you in a film or reality?", the film's real actors from the Italian co-production being mentioned during Corinne and Roland's search for a car to Oinville (to which they never specify further as to which Oinville they are referring to), and various
intertitles which are a defining feature to Godard's films. When Corinne and Roland eventually arrive at her parents' place, they discover that her father has died and her mother refuses to give them a share of the spoils. They kill her and hit the road again, only to fall into the hands of a group of
hippie revolutionaries (calling themselves the
Seine and Oise Liberation Front) that support themselves through theft and
cannibalism. Killed during an escape attempt, Roland is chopped up and cooked. ==Cast==