The film is set in Venice, in the season that most suits that city, winter, and shot in Losey's characteristic baroque style of the period. Baker is an upstart Welsh novelist engaged to an empty marriage, but gradually ensnared into an amour fou by the ferocious, loose temptress Eva. Love hardly enters into it, it is corruption by power, money and bad faith that are Losey's obsessions, and they are dwelt upon insistently with sheerly scathing distaste. The film undoubtedly belongs to Moreau who, in one of her finest performances, gives a portrait of terrifying honesty, the heartless self-possession of a woman who does nothing unless for money or whim. The figures of alienation wandering through an elegant landscape may be familiar from the Antonioni trilogy of the period, but the pessimism, energetic misanthropy and disenchantment with the world are all Losey's own. A stirring study of greed and lust.