Novelist, screenwriter and director Alain Robbe-Grillet's new feature draws on literature, painting and mythology to create a story set in the dream world of its protagonist. Walter, a young executive, spends his first night in a new, still-empty flat, his wife asleep beside him. Exhaustion and the absence of his familiar surroundings bring on a vast, intricate nightmare full of erotic adventures, intellectual traps and pale childhood terrors. Central to the dream are René Magritte's painting "La Belle Captive" and the legend "The Fiancée of Corinth," in which (in Walter's reenactment) a beautiful young woman appears, quickly disappears and is found to have been dead some seven years. The film, with all its gothic and mythic elements, is a skillful combination of Kafka-esque fatality and classic dream symbolism; its theme is the inability to carry out one's urgent tasks in this--or the other--reality. Robbe-Grillet's labyrinthine style is facilitated by veteran cinematographer Henri Alekan and a musical score that combines classical and jazz themes.