Lust and hedonism course through Ullmann's nonlinear narrative structure, which weaves together flashbacks, dream sequences, and present-day events. In an establishing present-day scene, an aging director interviews Marianne, who confesses her tumultuous affair with noted film director David on a trip to Paris. The pair, who consider themselves friends, find themselves overwhelmed by romantic urges in the red-hued nighttime, with platonic boundaries slowly broken. Yet the entanglement also causes the dissolution of her relationship with her husband Markus and daughter Isabelle. She explains tremblingly, “I was in a state of chaos I can’t describe.” 

The dissociative chaos of guilt, the way in which it erases the boundary between reality and psychology, reaches an uncanny apex when Marianne is uncoupled from her reflection by a mirage of her daughter. In this moment of horrible epiphany, Marrianne questions the responsibility of parenthood and how her decisions have imposed on the development of her young daughter. The film flashbacks to the director who concludes “Sometimes I think that inside Marianne, the actress I see in the mirror, is another person, with no name or identity”. Ullman demands careful consideration of adulthood and the burdens of responsibility that come with it, responsibilities that are interpersonal and those that are constructed through the order of society. What makes us fall in and out of love? How are women made to feel limited by motherhood and maternity? How does society permeate notions of acceptable and unacceptable behaviour? How can lust and sexual impulses dictate our lives if we let them?