Huppert plays Frédérique an attractive young redhead who, out of boredom and resentment that her womanizer father and friends molest young women in their hideaway chalet, leaves her father’s country trout farm to come to Paris. She’s marries a suicidal gay man, Galuchat (Jacques Spiesser). At a bowling alley she meets two businessmen, whom the economically struggling couple hustle in bowling. Invited to Tokyo by the younger, more free-spirited businessman Saint-Genis (Daniel Olbrychski), she deserts her hubby without any qualms to try her hand in the corporate game. In Tokyo she meets an aging American millionairess (Alexis Smith), who takes great joy telling her in a broken French that she had made love 33,000 times and then found bliss marrying a wealthy Japanese man. Frédérique soon begins an affair with Japanese tycoon Daigo Hamada (Isao Yamagata), the one Saint-Genis is visiting on business. Upon returning to Paris, she toys with Saint-Genis’s married businessman friend Rambert (Jean-Pierre Cassel), who is married to Lou (Jeanne Moreau) but goes crazy over Frédérique. She drives a wedge between Lou and her unethical hubby, and between Rambert and Saint-Genis. It seems Frédérique who is the film’s trout, nevertheless, has the teeth of a shark to fend off the many predators she attracts, as she willfully destroys Rambert’s marriage. Having Hamada back her Paris trout farm, run by her hubby, Frédérique says when asked how it feels to be on top: “It’s all the same to me.” Her cold personality is explained through intermittent flashbacks, where as a youth she joined a club of women who vowed “to get things out of men without giving them anything.”