'La Ronde' is split into many different little short stories of sex and romance, all of which interlock in and out with an interminable narrator who talks directly to the audience, explaining the different intricacies of the whole movie, as well as the characters themselves. Each character leads to a new one, so each character gets two stories of their own, a nice way of paying equal attention to the invented people of these stories. Max Olphüs is a famous film technician, and his ability with lenses and shadows and camera movement and lighting and angles and human faces is on full display here. The actresses especially are clouded in warmth, their faces burn and gel with the pictures, the details in their character are expressed through the manner of their sigh, in their tentativeness or lack of at the precipice of a sexual encounter. The actors are given detail as well, their womanizing efforts diplomatically are shown in shades of the same color, but never is there any sense of cruelty or real lechery, instead it is the 'merry go-round' of human interaction which guides the interactions. If the movie has any real problems, it is in its structure, which while beguiling and fundamentally interesting throughout, never lets its characters grow into fully fledged human beasts, it always has to chain them to the circumstances the movie finds them in. This is the conceit of the entire movie, so it is not really a fault, instead, it is both a limiting factor and the basis for its existence.