Though highly satirical and reflective of his typical anti-bourgeois sentiments, it is one of Buñuel's more realistic films, and generally avoids the outlandish surrealist imagery and far-fetched plot twists found in many of his other works.

Buñuel and Carrière would go on to collaborate on Belle de Jour (1967), The Milky Way (1969), The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), The Phantom of Liberty (1974) and That Obscure Object of Desire (1977).

In France in the late 1920s, Célestine, a stylish and attractive young chambermaid from Paris, arrives at a provincial estate and joins a household staff that includes a cook, a timid maid named Marianne, and Joseph, the groom, who spends his evenings writing nationalistic, anti-Semitic leaflets with a friend.

Célestine was primarily hired to work for the elderly Monsieur Rabour, who insists on calling her Marie, which is the name he has used for all of his chambermaids, and likes to touch her leg while she reads to him and watch as she walks around wearing certain shoes.

She and her husband are not physically intimate due to her dyspareunia, a problem with which the local priest has not been helpful, and Monsieur Monteil copes by expending his energy hunting small game in the surrounding woods and pursuing any woman who is nearby, including the former chambermaid, though Célestine playfully manages to keep him at arm's length.

While Joseph and his friend are making plans to attend a right-wing political rally, two police officers arrive and arrest the pair, having found the toe plate at the scene of Claire's murder.

In Cherbourg, Joseph cheers on a parade of nationalistic men as they march past his café, which his attractive younger wife has helped to fill with soldiers.

The final scene, in which marching rightists shout "Vive Chiappe", references the Paris police chief who stopped Buñuel's 1930 film L'Âge d'Or from being exhibited after the theater in which it was being shown was destroyed by Fascists.