Abbas Kiarostami, the critically acclaimed Iranian-born director, presents us with a puzzle set in beautiful Tuscan hill towns. An apparently unacquainted man and woman spend the day together. Then they pretend that they are married. And then they seem to have been long (and unhappily) married.
So after watching the film, one may ask if the couple was married and only pretending not to be at first? Or did they instead start pretending to be married and just get more realistic toward the end of the film? Or do different stages of the film depict different realities? If you need to know what is going on in a movie and why, this is not a good choice for you.
The couple is played by the Juliette Binoche, and the British opera singer William Shimell. They are excellent. Binoche won the Best Actress award at Cannes for this role.