La Belle Captive

On his way to deliver an important letter to the Comte de Corinthe for his glamorous, motorcycling boss Sara (Claire), Walter (Mesguich) comes across an injured woman, Marie-Ange (Lazure), lying in the road. In search of help, he takes her to an isolated villa where a mysterious convocation of sinister-looking gentlemen is in progress. A man calling himself a doctor (Chaumette) locks them in a bedroom where they make love. In the morning, Marie-Ange is gone and the villa deserted. A painting over the bed - Magritte's La Belle Captive - stirs echoes in Walter's mind. He has been experiencing visions of a theatre curtain framing part of a windswept beach, where the waves roll in remorselessly. The narrative, littered with false starts and dead ends, dreams within dreams, is pure Robbe-Grillet, recalling some of his startling early novels (Dans le Labyrinthe, La Maison de rendez-vous). Robbe-Grillet habitué Wade helps the viewer make sense of it all and assists his director in augmenting the tension as the sense of nightmarish claustrophobia builds towards the climax.