"The setting is Trieste in 1917. A wealthy businessman has an affair with a young working class woman. It's a provocative variation on The Blue Angel, but the angel wears red and the emphasis is less on any femme fatale than on the consequences of his self-serving images of her. The aging businessman is also a war profiteer troubled by the sounds of World War I in the distance, and the young woman represents a challenge to his highly ordered existence. With help from the occasional icy insights of a voice-over narrator, the film becomes a complex portrait of the tycoon's baffled consciousness (including his dreams). But it is also a study of old age, moneyed hypocrisy, and writing as a confrontation with mortality. After a decade of documentaries, actress-turned-director Margit Saad has switched to feature films, and this adaptation of a story by Italo Svevo ('Confessions of Zeno') reveals an intelligence that is both delicate and sardonic." Peter Hogue