Cotton-mill owner Archie Meighan, married to nineteen-year-old "Baby Doll", looks forward to the day his wife turns twenty and will finally allow him to sleep with her. But he has competition in the form of sly business competitor Silva Vacarro, who covets both Archie's cotton mill and his young and beautiful wife.

Ensconced in a sprawling rental villa, the world-weary Vera Baxter receives visits from two women, including a mysterious stranger to whom she recounts a schocking story about her marriage, the way she lives, and the reasons for her malaise. Setting her languid images to d'Alessio's incongruously breezy, endlessly looping score, Duras fashions a quietly shattering portrait of marriage as a kind of prison.

An unimpressive but well intending man is given the chance to marry a popular actress, of whom he has been a hopeless fan. But what he doesn't realize is that he is being used to make the actress' old flame jealous.

France, 1760. Marianne is commissioned to paint the wedding portrait of Héloïse, a young woman who has just left the convent. Because she is a reluctant bride-to-be, Marianne arrives under the guise of companionship, observing Héloïse by day and secretly painting her by firelight at night. As the two women orbit one another, intimacy and attraction grow as they share Héloïse first moments of freedom. Héloïse's portrait soon becomes a collaborative...