Buñuel’s lush adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s late 1920s novel examines the plight of a successful surgeon’s frigid wife, who ends up working in a brothel. As the director noted, his approach to "such a stale subject" was to mix "indiscriminately and without warning in the montage the things that actually happen to the heroine, and the fantasies and morbid impulses which she imagines." The result is a thoroughly surreal, kaleidoscopic work filled with uncanny yet compelling narrative shifts and reversals that occur as Buñuel chronicles the attempts by the young wife (Deneuve) to come to terms with the powerful psychic forces that both attract and repel her.