Pol Hoffmann

After his wife dies, middle-aged businessman Philip Emmenthal, at the prompting of his playboy son Storey, populates his Geneva villa with eight-and-a-half concubines. Three are from Kyoto, where Storey manages Pachinco palaces. Each has a distinctive personality: a nun, a child bearer, a gambler, a student of Kabuki, a horsewoman with a pet pig, a maid. As a year passes, the women begin asserting their own power.

A clumsy Elvis-imitator and an unsuccessful russian dancing-master save a banker from the attempted murder of the Mafia.

The story of Johnny Chicago's brother, Ray, and his friend Chuck Moreno, both petty criminals. The latter wants to take the ashes of Johnny, who was fatally wounded by the police after a bank heist, to Chicago.

For most people, a wedding signifies a hopeful beginning, but then, Catherine and Christian aren't most people. She is a spoiled rich girl with an insatiable desire for the low and degraded side of life. Christian is without any resources, inner or outer, and caters to Catherine's every whim, even when she sends him out in the middle of their wedding reception to score some heroin for her. Their wedding is the starting point for their relentless downward spiral into the most brutally senseless lives imaginable, in this stylishly filmed exploration of the dark netherworld of the human spirit.

The title of the film, set in Luxembourg in 1942, during the Nazi occupation, amalgamates the words Schacko (helmet) and chapeau claque (opera hat). The village, in which it is set, has not yet been feeling the effects of the war at this point.