(2007; original title, C'est Gradiva qui vous appelle, French; It's Gradiva Who Is Calling You) "On the other side of the real world," this is a dream that goes wrong. Hermione (Arielle Dombasle), a dream actress, explains to a perplexed John Locke (James Wilby), a British professor of Orientalism in Morocco researching the sketchbooks drawn there by the 19th-century French painter Eugène Delacroix: "I act in people's dreams," including his.

"The dream world is as real as the waking world," she says to the art historian, only it's "infinitely more violent." Also highly erotic with plenty of sadomasochism.

At the Golden Triangle, an exclusive club, Hermione also participates in live tableaux, depicting famous artworks of Orientalism, to which Locke (his name suggests a connection with the 17th-century English empirical philosopher) is invited by Claudine (Marie Espinosa), another actress.

However, he has seen pale-skinned Claudine before at the acting academy of Dr Anatoli (Farid Chopel), showing Locke drawings from Delcriox's sketchbooks of his model Gradiva (though he's skeptical of their authenticity since nothing in any of the artist's other sketches displayed similar carnal detail) while fondling the alabaster girl's breasts; Locke pays little attention to screams (just actresses practicing) and cages with naked girls chained within.

He had been brought to Dr Anatoli's residence in a blue taxi after following a blonde woman (Dombasle) in a sheer-white flowing garment lightly flitting through the medina in Marrakesh who disappeared into an antique shop where outside a blind man with "second sight" speaks his name and directs him to where he can locate genuine pictures by Delacroix.

On the drive to Dr Anatoli's, the blind man tells Locke of the ghost of a golden-haired woman beheaded a century earlier for allowing herself to be seduced by a passing Frenchman; all the souvenir shops in the souk offer the axe with which she was executed.

Locke had left his room at the hotel near the ruins of Tazet's old Casbah where, as Dr Anatoli informs him, the drama concluded - Leila's execution - to find relief from a toothache. The evening before riding his motorcycle into Marrakesh, a mysterious package of slides with erotic sketches purportedly by Delacroix had been brought to him by Belkis (Dany Verissimo), his "bed slave," who answers his question, "Haven't you got a heart?" by saying: "I don't know, Monsieur."

Drawing on Wilhelm Jensen's 1903 novel, notable in literature for having been psychoanalyzed by Freud, and taking the historical fact that two of Delacroix's eight sketchbooks from Morocco disappeared, director/writer (novelist and leading exponent of New Wave literature) Alain Robbe-Grillet's phantasmagoric film of operatic tragedy creates a dreamlike experience inside a labyrinth of longing, involving imagination, sexual desire, and murder, while inserting a satirical description of censorship in the film industry.

Making illusions real, John Locke's adventures are perhaps the product of an oneirographer (Dombasle) who invents dreams while composing her memoirs, projecting herself into the future, along with the people around her, rather than writing lies about her past; through Hermione (her double) she tells Locke of the government's enforcers who patrol people's dreams, of the double standards permitted and royalties paid.

When Claudine asks the authoress if she's mad, she answers: "Madness would be to allow external events to happen without intervening."

After hearing the siren song ("It's Death who's calling you," Belkis will warn him), Locke meets Hermione's twin Leila outside the hotel in her diaphanous white linen ("My innocence washed the blood from my wounds"), hearing her, a slave to the past, tell of her fate of having to repeat the tragedy each night.

Following an interview at the Golden Triangle with Commissioner Mahdi, Locke learns of his being a suspect in the rape and murder of a woman; in room 13 at Dr Anatoli's academy, he'd entered a chamber where a woman lay bleeding as photoflashes caught him holding a bloody dagger. After fleeing the scene, a photo (of which Belkis - who also appears as Joujou in the Golden Triangle - says she knows nothing) appears in his room at the hotel.

In the blue taxi driven by the blind man, Locke and Claudine go to Mogador on the coast where they see Gradiva's grave (1806-1842), and he takes the role of Delacroix, while in the hotel room Belkis silently takes the part of Madam Butterfly.

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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