In this meticulously composed impressionistic melodrama, Germaine Dulac takes an ironic and occasionally sarcastic look at the life of the French upper bourgeoisie. A famous actress, seduced and abandoned by a rich man, becomes a merciless woman and plunges men into ruin in a ruthless yet captivating manner. The film subsequently deconstructs the femme fatale archetype using sophisticated narrative and aesthetic strategies such as symbolist staging, a self-reflexive narrative style and an associative editing technique that in many ways anticipates aspects of the Soviet montage of the 1920s. It is thus "one of the few early creations of a sophisticated and complex cinema that is both commercial and artistic, socially engaged and feminist." (Tami Williams)