It stars Michel Piccoli and Anouk Aimée, who won the Best Actor and Best Actress prizes respectively at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.

Mauro then finds himself becoming jealous of their relationship and, feeling even betrayed, dreams of being able to kill her by pushing her from the window of their home.

Realizing that Marta has gained an autonomy that he had hoped she could never obtain, Mauro completely loses his lucidity and commits suicide by throwing himself through the window of his house, in the way he had imagined to get rid of his sister.

The film was favourably reviewed by the eminent critic Pauline Kael in The New Yorker : " The protagonist of Leap - a judge, Mauro Ponticelli, played by the usually suave French actor Michel Piccoli - is mean in perverse, Bunuelian ways...Mauro has always been protected and cared for by his older sister, Marta..He has no intention of growing up...[her] unusual behaviour has actually been a sign that she is rebelling - that she's struggling to free herself from her deathly bondage to him...

The movie is about family entanglements and the functions of madness...Mauro is a craven fraud...Mauro the judge is a worm : a spoiled worm wriggling in its comfortable nest...Piccoli is able to give this mesmerizing performance despite the fact that he and Anouk Aimée are dubbed into Italian...Anouk Aimée is usually strikingly beautiful and a little blank - not quite in contact;..