Zazel is the title character, a world-famous artist commissioned to create "the most arousing perfume ever". In the course of devising this scent, Zazel variously paints pictures, views photographs, and wanders among the flowers of her garden, each experience inspiring her to envision a powerful sexual fantasy. The film consists of nearly a dozen individually themed sequences which reference and recreate iconography drawn from mythology, religion, literature, film and even Jungian psychology.