In Paris, four men in their 40s meet regularly to play tennis and socialise: Étienne Dorsay, a senior civil servant, is married to Marthe, with whom he has two teenage daughters; Simon, a hypochondriac doctor, lives with his overbearing Jewish mother; Bouly is a serial womaniser whose wife keeps leaving him; and Daniel, a car salesman, has a secret relationship with another man while having an affair with a much younger man.

In the car park of his office building one morning, Étienne sees a beautiful young woman walk over a grating when, like Marilyn Monroe, a blast of air blows her red dress over her head.

Later that night, as Étienne leaves with his family, his friends devise a scheme to take him to meet Charlotte at her apartment, where the two ultimately consummate their mutual attraction.

She hurriedly instructs Étienne, who is wearing a dressing gown, to wait on the ledge outside her eighth-floor apartment window, assuring him that her husband will not stay long.

The fire brigade soon arrives and deploys a life net while a television crew films the rescue, which is watched by his friends, as well as his wife and daughters.

Étienne searches for possible conquests among the crowd and, after noticing an attractive blonde reporter, proceeds to jump into the life net as he remarks that he is "only at the beginning of [his] ascent".

In France, Claude Brasseur in the film is the first "positive" homosexual character in French cinema, to the point that a San Francisco association wanted to congratulate him.

His agent initially advised him not to accept the role, but he insisted, setting a condition: "I said straight away that I didn't want to make Daniel a twisted madwoman!".