A collaborative screen adaptation by a group of film director students, co-directing under the artistic supervision of Michael Haneke, who was their directing professor at the time. In 1923 Vienna, six restless, promiscuous medical students drift through a boarding house, indulging in sex, drink, and cruel games. Freder torments the young maid while eyeing his former lover, the disillusioned aristocrat Desiree. Petrell leaves Marie for ruthless Irene, but Marie quickly turns to Desiree. Trapped between bourgeois stagnation and suicide, this post-war generation sees youth as a sickness-and seeks to destroy it.