A bourgeois couple wanders through Milanese clubs and high-society parties in search of something that has long since vanished. He, a writer, becomes infatuated with the twenty-year-old daughter of an industrialist who wants to hire him to write a book about his company, while she realizes that she no longer loves her husband. This is the second installment of the trilogy on incommunicability, written by Ennio Flaiano and Tonino Guerra, featuring superb black-and-white cinematography by the renowned Gianni Di Venanzo. The film won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 1961.