The original screenplay focuses on the choices young lovers must make as they find themselves surrounded by increasing political unrest in late-1930s Europe.

In Paris in the year 1924, a young 14-year-old Gilda Bessé, the daughter of a French aristocrat and an emotionally unstable American mother, is told by a fortune teller that the life line on her palm does not extend past the age of 34.

Years later, on a rainy night in 1933, Gilda stumbles into the room of Guy Malyon, an Irishman who is a first-year scholarship student at Cambridge University.

A few years later, Guy sees her as an extra in a Hollywood film, and shortly after he coincidentally receives a letter from her inviting him to visit her in Paris, where she is working as a photographer.

Gilda, however, has no interest in politics or anything else that might disrupt her life of luxury, and pleads with the two to ignore the conflict, but they feel compelled to act and depart for Spain.

One day he arrives at a café to meet a contact, but instead is approached by Gilda, who has overheard her German lover plotting a trap and has come to help him escape in cleric's clothing she has concealed in the restaurant's washroom.

As he returns to Paris to find her, Guy is unaware that Bietrich has been killed in Gilda's apartment and that she has been taken captive by a mob intent on avenging the deaths of their loved ones.

The soundtrack included "Parlez-moi d'amour" by Jean Lenoir, "Blue Drag" by Josef Myrow, "Minor Swing" by Stéphane Grappelli and Django Reinhardt, "Big Jim Blues" by Harry Lawson and Mary Lou Williams, "La rumba d'amour" by Simon Rodriguez, "Vous qui passez sans me voir" by Charles Trenet and Jean Sablon, "My Girl's Pussy" by Harry Roy and performed by John Duigan and "La litanie à la vierge" by Francis Poulenc.

The website's critical consensus says "Head in the Clouds aspires to soapy melodrama, but gets lost in its own lather, never mining romance from its central love affair or achieving authenticity in its period setting.

"[6] In his review in The New York Times, Stephen Holden said, "The strength of [Charlize Theron's] go-for-broke performance only underlines the weaknesses of the film .

a mixture of Casablanca and Cabaret, or possibly Hemingway and Henry Miller, and finally, it doesn't work, in part because the erotic content seems self-conscious and force-fit.

"[9] Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded it one out of a possible four stars and described it as "a World War II melodrama of epic silliness and supreme vapidity .