After his wife leaves him, a film director starts a passionate affair with a young aristocratic woman. Soon a stranger threatens him to stop seeing her and, after a lover’s row, she vanishes. Whilst searching for her, he meets a young actress, whose curiosity is piqued to find the missing woman.

After 1975’s international production with Jack Nicholson, The Passenger, and his experiment in video, The Mystery of Oberwald, Michelangelo Antonioni returns to the kind of film that made him famous, like L’avventura and L’eclisse: the chic dissection of troubled romance in modern Italy.