Paris in 1960. Henri Marsay is a rich play-boy who runs a fashion agency. One of the pleasures in which he likes to indulge, with the aid of a circle of accomplices, is to capture more or less consenting young women. But then he meets a beautiful and mysterious woman, an enchanting and capricious young girl with golden eyes, who has been secretly following him.
He photographs her and she captures his interest immediately, but while her interest in him is very apparent, she is also unforthcoming and secretive. Henri becomes obsessed with both her beauty and her mystery, soon realising that she is not just another conquest but that he is falling in love with her. However, despite his attempts to discover who she is, her identity remains a mystery.
After some time Henri begins to understand that the girl with whom he has fallen in love is actually the lesbian partner of the jealous and possessive Eléonore, his mistress and associate in the fashion agency, who keeps her in a life of elegant baroque luxury. The strange, complex and unstable love triangle that ensues cannot be sustained as possession becomes the ultimate object of desire.
Director Jean-Gabriel Albicocco's film, released in 1961, is a modern adaption of the story by Honoré de Balzac based on the rivalry of heterosexual and homosexual love. The scenery and symbolism he uses, with the film's striking black-and-white images, combine to accentuate the mood of mystery and muted perversity, in an almost overwhelming sense of the romantic. Marie Laforêt was to become known as la fille aux yeux d'or throughout her long career as an actress and singer.
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