Two brothers, practical Jérôme and the younger Jean, inherit the family fortune. A surrealist at heart, in love with love and death, Jean soon disappears, having spirited his beloved Marie, an opera singer, to a romantic seaside villa. But Marie can’t be owned. Two other objects of desire are entwined in Jean’s imagination and the film’s plot: a Kodak and a pistol. How a gun and a camera speak to each other is one of several prescient themes Epstein develops through entirely visual means—superimposition, montage, startling close-ups—in this film that should be better known.