Elizabeth (Danièle Gégauff) sends telegrams to her old boyfriend Ben (Dallesandro) in New York City and to her younger sister Léo (Schneider) in Rome to join her in Paris, where she is selling her dead father's estate.
Merry-Go-Round was conceived in the aftermath of the collapse of Rivette's projected four-film series Scenes de la vie parallele (of which only Duelle and Noroît were completed).
[2] In an interview with Serge Daney and Jean Narboni, Rivette describes the film's process: "We started work with the two actors, and after 8 days, things were going very badly.
It was like a machine that, once set in motion, must continue running despite changing regimes, forced or arbitrary accelerations, until the energy was all burned up, exhausted.... We had a starting point of course, and then we made up the beginning of a story, with a father who had disappeared, but all along we told ourselves, this is just a pretext for Maria and Joe to get to know each other.I like that idea: two people get together because a third, who has arranged to meet them, does not show up.
And since I didn't feel like making a film about the Resistance or the terrorist underground, it became that more banal situation, two people convoked by a third who is only the sister of the one and the girlfriend of the other.