In the first of her three films with Werner Schroeter, Isabelle Huppert plays the protagonist in his adaptation of the novel by the celebrated Austrian author Ingeborg Bachmann. Huppert’s character is an unnamed writer who escapes the confines of her comfortable life with her companion and the pressures of her career by beginning an affair with another man, who is passionate but aloof. As her love becomes an obsession, Huppert’s character is haunted by visions of a violent older man, perhaps her father. Thus does Schroeter illustrate Bachmann’s investigation into the instability, if not the impossibility, of female subjectivity in a patriarchal world.