Set in Budapest in the 1920s, this strange romance is based on a Pirandello play about an amnesiac cafe singer who returns to a husband she can't really remember, in order to escape the hypnotist-sadist lover she wants to forget. As singer and sadist, respectively, Greta Garbo and Erich von Stroheim battle it out in some unsettlingly erotic scenes, she in a bleached-blonde wig, he with his shaved head. Melvyn Douglas is definitely the husband, but whether Garbo is the wife remains the question throughout this poetic and disturbing riddle of identity.