Max has at last decided to settle down and marry his current love, Muriel, the sister of his boss. He is in a jeweller's shop choosing an engagement ring for her but is unable to make a decision between three very different rings, each of which he says he likes. Just as he is about to leave Paris on a four-day business trip to Tokyo he catches a glimpse of his former love, Lisa, a beautiful girl who disappeared mysteriously from his life two years before. Discovering the door key she has left behind whilst making a telephone call, he impulsively abandons his plan to fly to Japan and finds himself pursuing her, this unexpected opportunity having awakened feelings for her that he cannot now ignore.
A meeting with his old friend Lucien who currently has difficulties in his own love-life, enables Max to confide his feelings to someone while he tries to make sense of them himself. Now obsessed with meeting Lisa, his search eventually leads him to her address and he enters the apartment to wait for her. He is then surprised to find it is a case of mistaken identity when another girl, Alice, enters the flat and emotionally distraught, attempts to throw herself from an upper-storey window. Max drags her back into the room and tries to calm her down. She tells him, however, that her name is also Lisa and that it is her apartment. Captivated by her mystery and her strange resemblance to Lisa, he is irresistibly attracted to Alice and eventually they become romantically entwined.
Still determined to meet Lisa, Max finds that she has a lover, and that her lover's wife has recently died in suspicious circumstances. Gradually, Max is drawn into the mystery, which ultimately he hopes will lead him closer to Lisa. Things however are not what they appear to be, and much of what is now happening is a result of past events which gradually become clear to us when seen in flashbacks. Central to these is the enticingly enigmatic Alice who appears to have had a history with Lisa that curiously parallels Max's own.
This convoluted, multi-layered and brilliantly constructed romance uses repeated motifs and juxtaposed images to subtly indicate the parallels, connections and interpretations in the events of the lives of these characters. Switching between time, chic cafés, beautiful Parisian apartments, and the three women in Max's life, this very stylish suspense thriller confounds us with an extraordinary and elusive mystery, with undercurrents of obsession and jealousy, as it races towards its heady and devastating conclusion.
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