This film tells about love. It is a love story but projected through several curvy mirrors. The weird meeting of an olding man and a young woman. They meet trying to rent an apartment in Paris. He is an American, she is a French. They talk both French and English and even this is unusual enough. Like in other Italian films there is not much explication, not many words. But actions, gestures, eye sights. And posing, lots of posing. The man does not want to know anything about the woman, even her name. They become lovers. To say by accident is to say nothing, it's just like some crude primitive force threw them into each other's arms. But they both enjoy it and decide to continue these strange relations.
The story of the two lovers is complemented by the personal stories of these two characters. The man, Paul is visited by his mother-in-law as his wife had committed suicide and nobody knows why. Paul does not like this woman and makes her suffer because he hates everything she represents. He loved his deceased wife but cannot forgive her suicide. The scene when he cries at the coffin of his wife is piercing.
The woman named Jeanne who when she changed her hair style suddenly chaged into a girl (became to look like 18 years old girl) has a boy friend who is shooting the film. She is a main character of this documentary. She is telling about her past before the camera. Actually she is posing before Paul too. She talks a lot and she even makes him talk and that's how we learn a little about his past too. She is always talking meeting her boyfriend and he is eager to record all these philosophic trash. She continues to meet Paul too and there are much cruelty and love in their relations. All this lasts until some day her boyfriend proposes her and they are going to marry.
They are just about to marry when just before the wedding the bride disappears. She comes to Paul. It happens she loves him so much that it is difficult for her to make a choice. But she understans that their love is doomed and in fact there is no choice. So she rushes from one lover to another. When she decides to leave Paul forever he appears again. "Nothing can change", he says. "One thing finished, the other is beginning." He drags her to a restaurant where a dance competition is taking place. They have one of their usual dialogues. When Jeanne finally leaves he rushes after her. There is a passion between them that will soon lead to tragedy. He loves Jeanne and when she leaves he tries to keep her by force. And suddenly when he caught her in some house everything became quiet. He goes to the balcony. Some kind of illumunation strikes him and the next moment we see him lying on the pavement. He managed to repeat his wife's last action.
As I said this film keeps you in strain all the time and you are waiting what will happen next. The actors' play is very good in this film. Marlon Brando is striking as a handsome olding man "with thinning hair". His cruelty is not explainable and perhaps this is what attracts Jeanne (Maria Schneider). Some episodes emotionally are so sharp that you feel a wide range of feelings simultaniously. Like Marlon Brando at the very beginning when we just see his face and his figure. Or crying Jeanne. Not a bad film to see.
