It opens at the funeral cremation of the mother of staid bank clerk Henry (Alec McCowen). At the funeral is an elderly woman of an indeterminate age, Augusta (Maggie Smith), who is outrageously over-costumed, wears too much cosmetics and has hair that is dyed a bright carrot-red. The eccentric introduces herself as the drab banker’s Aunt Augusta–someone he never met and thought was deceased. Auntie says “I haven’t seen you since your baptism—to which I wasn’t invited. But I showed up anyway.” She learns Henry leads a dull life, whose only excitement is to cultivate his dahlias. And, the free-spirited aunt immediately has plans to expand Henry’s worldly experience by using him and his respectable image to get herself out of a pickle. Augusta’s lover from the past, the one she loved the most, Mr. Visconti (Robert Stephens, real-life husband of Maggie Smith), has been kidnapped and held for ransom of $100,000 in the East. To make sure that she pays, the kidnappers keep sending her packages with his body parts (a finger here and an ear there).

Henry is taken to auntie’s flashy apartment and meets her current lover and companion, a much younger black male fortune teller, Wordsworth (Louis Gossett Jr.), and through a series of flashbacks we become acquainted with her glamorous past and other lovers in her fast life-style. Augusta leads a shady life that among other things involves smuggling huge sums of money through international borders. To avoid rival gangsters and the police, she uses Henry as a front. They cross Europe after starting in Paris and take the Orient Express to Istanbul. On the journey, Henry becomes the perfect foil as he unwittingly smokes pot for the first time with American hippie coed Tooley (Cindy Williams) and fully engages in Augusta’s madcap bohemian existence, which leads to recharging his batteries to live a fuller life and getting to know secrets about Augusta that are startling.