The film slowly develops from a drama about blackmail into a dark, yet tender, supernatural love story between Marie and Julien, played by Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz.

[3][4][5] Anne Brochet plays the blackmailed Madame X. Béart had previously worked with Rivette in La Belle Noiseuse, as had Radziwiłowicz in Secret Defense.

[6] By chance, he meets Marie (Béart), a beautiful young woman he last saw a year ago, and they begin a passionate relationship.

[5][6] They agree to meet again, but Marie fails to appear and he returns home to find Madame X waiting for him against their agreement, so he raises his price tenfold.

He tries to find her by ringing her old boss, then tracks her down when an unknown woman calls to tell him the hotel Marie is staying at.

She is sometimes cold or trance-like, at one point reciting words in an unidentified language,[11][12] and she is physically detached and unaware of the time — Julien corrects her "bonjour" to "bonsoir".

[13] She is jealous of his ex,[14] compulsively decorates and rearranges a room in his attic,[5] feels compelled to act out her dreams,[9] and does not bleed when scratched[11] — something she keeps from Julien.

[5][11] Julien returns home and Marie silently leads him to the attic where she has prepared a noose, feeling she has to hang herself again.

Marie slowly covers her face with her hands — "the forbidden sign" — and Julien becomes oblivious to her and unaware of why he is bleeding.

[18] The name of Julien's cat, Nevermore, evokes Poe's The Raven and its similar themes of death and longing.

[17] Julien's work as a clockmaker, literally trying to repair time, is an obvious metaphor,[17] and the film is also timeless, giving no indication of when it is set.

[8] The plot features dream logic impinging on reality:[19][20][21] Senses of Cinema highlighted the role of "outlandish chance"[9] and Film Comment noted the feeling that the characters are inventing or re-enacting the narrative.

[23] The emotional distance of the characters and the intellectual and artificial-seeming, quasi-theatrical dialogue is deliberate,[10][17] depicting their simultaneous connection and isolation.

[17] The chasm between Marie and Julien, due to his corporeality and her ghostly nature, is emphasised in the contrast between his physical activity and her status as an onlooker.

[5] Rivette says he wanted the lovers to appear ill-suited and for the viewer to question the relationship;[16] they love each other passionately yet they are essentially strangers.

[11] The credits are accompanied by an upbeat jazz song performed by Blossom Dearie, Our Day Will Come,[9] that represents love as a pledge,[10] the only music used in the film.

The five candid and emotionally charged sex scenes focus on their upper bodies and faces,[11][17] and on their erotic monologues that employ elements of fairy tale, horror, and sadomasochism.

[10] Rivette originally began to make Marie et Julien, as it was then titled, in 1975 with producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff as part of a series of four films he first called Les filles du feu and later Scènes de la Vie Parallele.

[29][32] He decided to film Marie et Julien; a script had never been written and the footage had been lost, but cryptic notes by his assistant Claire Denis that had been kept by Lubtchansky (who had also been cinematographer in 1975) were enough to work from.

[16][33] The original screenplay included a speaking "polyglot cat", characters whose names change, a "suicide room" similar to The Seventh Victim, "Madame X", and an unknown "forbidden gesture" that the notes stated: "Do not forget".

"[25] Béart's image in the media at the time was characterised by the near hysteria seen when she appeared naked on the cover of Elle in May 2003 after filming ended.

[11] The film illustrates Rivette's view that the act of watching cinema involves game-playing, day-dreaming and paranoid fantasy.

[38] Film critic Glenn Kenny has said that the "calm precision" of the mise en scène in the opening dream sequence "put [him] under such a powerful spell" that "it reconfirmed ... Rivette's standing as an ultimately unquantifiable master".

[44] Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian was disappointed, arguing that "All the story's power is allowed to leak away by the deliberative heaviness with which Rivette pads through his 150-minute narrative, with its exasperating lack of dramatic emphasis.

"[45] Philip French noted similarities to Hitchcock's Vertigo and Jean Cocteau's Orphée, but called it "surprisingly flat and unmagical".

[20] The Digital Fix argued that Rivette's direction resulted in a product that "if never exactly dull and certainly the work of a master, is ultimately an empty film that has nothing to offer but its own cleverness".

[35] Keith Uhlich of Slant Magazine found it was "a lesser Rivette offering — a watchable, ultimately unfulfilling ghost story".

[3][13][17] The US and UK distributions, respectively released on 12 July 2005 by Koch Lorber Films and 28 February 2005 by Artificial Eye, come with optional English subtitles and the special features on a single disc.