Merchant Ivory Productions

While visiting her sister in Paris, a young woman finds romance and learns her brother-in-law is a philanderer.

His wife having recently died, Thomas Jefferson accepts the post of United States ambassador to pre-revolutionary France, though he finds it difficult to adjust to life in a country where the aristocracy subjugates an increasingly restless peasantry. In Paris, he becomes smitten with cultured artist Maria Cosway, but, when his daughter visits from Virginia accompanied by her attractive slave, Sally Hemings, Jefferson's attentions are diverted.

This fictionalized story, based on the family life of writer James Jones, is an emotional slice-of-life story. Jones is portrayed here as Bill Willis, a former war hero turned author who combats alcoholism and is starting to experience health problems. Living in France with his wife, daughter, and an adopted son, the family travels an unconventional road which casts them as outsiders to others. Preaching a sexual freedom, his daughter's sexual discovery begins at an early age and betrays her when the family moves to Hanover in America. Her overt sexuality clashes with the values of her teenage American peers and gives her a problematic reputation. Meanwhile, her brooding brother copes with his own interior pain regarding his past, only comfortable communicating within the domestic space.

An expatriated French novelist returns to Paris when she learns that her childhood home is being placed on the auction block.

A gay young man is recruited into an illicit love triangle to watch a much older man’s sexual liaison, but ends up witnessing what turns out to be his murder. The next day the young man's opera diva mother informs him that his estranged father has been in Paris... until the previous night when he was murdered. Seeking help with a psychiatrist, the young man comes across an eccentric actress who has come totally unhinged by the death of that psychiatrist, the infamous Docteur Rey. At first mistaking her for the doctor, the young man embarks on a madcap mystery, reminiscent of an Agatha Christie novel, with Paris as the backdrop.