A carpenter's son, Julien Sorel, armed with brilliance and a mastery of manipulation, climbs from tutor in Verrières to the seminary and into the most illustrious marquis' mansion in Paris. He is on the verge of reaching a height of nobility he never dared dream of. Yet the moment it is within his grasp, he realizes with a jolt: this rise was nothing but a trap set by the very class he sought to enter. He schemes every step upward, scaling heights she could never hope to reach. She treads carefully, burying her secrets in the deepest corners of marriage. Just when everyone believes this is merely a legend of a lowborn man's triumph, fate delivers its cruelest answer in the sound of a gunshot inside a church. The barrel is aimed at the woman he once loved with all his heart. There is only one thing he wants to ask her: when you wrote that letter of denunciation, did you ever truly love me?
Based on the French literary classic The Red and the Black by Stendhal.
