The film consists of several thematically linked scenes: five gatherings of a group of bourgeois friends, and the four dreams of different characters. The beginning of the film focuses on the gatherings, while the latter part focuses on the dreams, but both are intertwined. There are also scenes involving other characters, including two in which a Maoist terrorist from Miranda attempts to assassinate the ambassador.
The film's world is not logical, and the bizarre events are accepted by the characters. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie was a critical and commercial success.
The would-be guests then invite Alice to join them for dinner at a nearby inn. There, a waitress informs them that the restaurant is under new management. There are no diners inside, and the party hurriedly departs shortly after discovering a vigil for the manager, who died a few hours earlier, in an adjoining room.
Acosta sees a young woman selling clockwork-animal toys outside; he shoots one of the toys with a rifle and the woman runs off. He explains that she is part of a Maoist Mirandan terrorist group that has been targeting him for months. They throw him out, but when he returns wearing his bishop's robes, they embrace him with deference. The bishop asks to work for them as their gardener. He tells them that when he was a child, his parents were poisoned with arsenic and the culprit was never apprehended.
The women visit a teahouse , where a soldier tells them about his childhood. Following his mother's death, his cold-hearted father sent him to military school. The ghost of the soldier's mother informed him that the man was not his real father but his father's killer; they had dueled over her. She asks her son to poison the culprit, and he complies.
