This lovely film might be Akerman's postmodernist version of a city symphony, its beautifully paced rhythms and variations somehow “outside” the melody. The film looks in on dozens of mini-dramas that take place during one warm, muggy, thundery night in Brussels. Akerman's camera follows the characters through the bars, apartments, restaurants, and streets of the city she knows best, recording the action with a sly sense of humor. The subject is love-the impulse that thrusts two beings together, the awkwardness and the exhilaration of contact, the desires, the disappointments. There are many actors but no characters, and fewer than 100 words spoken. Cahiers du cinéma called it a “comédie sentimentale treated as a choreographed dance.”