“What Rainer was up to, after all, was the reinvention of melodrama as a genre, accented for the contemporary psyche.”—B. Ruby Rich  

Namechecking both Virginia Woolf and Jean-Luc Godard in the film’s opening segment, Rainer continues to experiment in her elegiac, hybrid third feature with unshackling narrative from conventional representation, using the paradoxical feminine figure of a lion tamer, Kristina (played by several women, including Rainer herself), and a disjunctive audiovisual syntax that pushes avant-garde film grammar into thrillingly novel, expressive realms. Kristina arrives from Budapest to 1970s New York City, harboring hopes of becoming a dance choreographer, as well as romantic affections for an elusive sailor named Raoul.