Fabulous dreamlike movie. The drama of in-communicability as never before,and never after.A couple ,Montand and Aimée, feels that their love is becoming a thing of the past.He is a linguistics professor,he reigns over words and culture;she does not understand the language they speak in this part of Belgium. One night,both take a train;suddenly it stops.Anne (Aimée) has disappeared ,and Matthias (Montand) gets out of the train.With two unknown guys,he sees the train silently and slowly moving ,like in a dream.The dream has begun. Matthias and his two mates are left alone in the country.They arrive in a small village where,that crowns it,the university professor cannot understand a single world of the inhabitants' language.A very strange scene shows the three men coming into a tiny movie theater.On the screen,an odd,almost worrying film is projected:a parachutist floating in the air,sometimes shot in close-up,with an almost unbearable soundtrack.The audience seems to live in another world.Not only Matthias does not understand the language,but he does not understand their entertainment either .Then they go to a restaurant ,the staff of which seems to wait for them.Maybe.. When he returns to reality,Matthias will find out how selfish he has been with Anne.But it's a movie you can interpret in accordance with your sensitivity.Never a director has gone so far in intertwining dream with reality.The incommunicability of Matthias and the strange people of his dream is a metaphor of that of the two lovers.But ,because of the harrowing conclusion,which leaves the audience totally hopeless,perhaps this dream was an escape,or a way to delay what was ineluctable.André Delvaux gave us the best European movie of 1968.

The line between fantasy and reality is once more blurred in this Belgian/French drama about a professor of literature who develops an obsession with a beautiful woman he meets (or imagines meeting) in the woods. He has an affair with this woman, but before he can run off with her, his daughter, who is an object of his incestuous desire (as several daydream sequences make clear), kills the stranger. Perhaps, though, his daughter only kills his daydreams when she gets married.