Fontana's recent discovery of these old photos have aroused his suspicion, and Carloni is hired to uncover whatever he can about Paola's life before her marriage.

Back in Milan, as Paola exits the La Scala opera house dressed in a white fur coat with her husband and friends, she is startled to see Guido standing across the street.

Meanwhile, Carloni's investigation intensifies, as he finds out more about the mysterious accident in the elevator shaft, Paola's sudden disappearance, and Guido's role in all this.

He also learns that Paola left Ferrara two days after the accident and met her future husband shortly thereafter in Milan—never telling him about her friend's death.

In the coming days, Paola and Guido's once-casual reunion escalates into a full-blown passionate affair played out in rented rooms.

Pressured to complete his investigation as soon as possible, Carloni writes of the affair and suspicious circumstances surrounding her friend's death, and submits the report to Fontana.

[7] In a 2018 interview, Bosè commented, "On that set, for the first time, I felt beautiful; I wore wonderful dresses and amazing hats similar to those of Gala, Salvador Dali's wife."

She recalled a particularly bad day in which, after shooting 40 takes, she broke character and laughed in response to assistant director Citto Maselli's humorous attempt to defuse the tension on set.

[7] In his review for Slant magazine, Dan Callahan gave the film four stars, calling it a "new type of reflective cinema ... dedicated equally to the interior lives of actor 'models' and the obscure surfaces of the photographed world".

What at first seems like clumsiness finally falls away and something highly original takes its place: an ambiguous meditation on the emptiness of upwardly mobile modern life.