We are never quite sure why, although by the time the movie is over we have a few depressing clues. On the day the movie begins, the wife has committed suicide. He is an American, living in Paris these last several years with a French wife who owned a hotel that is not quite a whorehouse. What began, on the man's part, as totally depersonalized sex develops into a deeper relationship almost to spite him. Still, inevitably, the man and the girl do begin to learn about each other. What has come together in the apartment is almost an elemental force, not a connection of two beings with identities in society. They do continue to meet, and at Paul's insistence they do not exchange names. Their difference is so great that it creates tremendous dramatic tension more, indeed, than if both characters were filled with passion. One of the movie's strengths comes from the tragic imbalance between Paul's need and Jeanne's almost unthinking participation in it. Why does she agree? From her point of view - which is not a terribly perceptive one - why not? One of the several things this movie is about is how one person, who may be uncommitted and indifferent, nevertheless can at a certain moment become of great importance to another. He tells her that they will continue to meet there, in the empty apartment, and she agrees.
Paul rapes her, if rape is not too strong a word to describe an act so casually accepted by the girl. It is a big, empty apartment, with a lot of sunlight but curiously little cheer. The movie begins when Jeanne, who is about to be married, goes apartment-hunting and finds Paul in one of the apartments. The girl, Jeanne, is not a friend and is hardly even a companion it's just that because she happens to wander into his life, he uses her as an object of his grief. The events that take place in the everyday world are remote to Paul, whose attention is absorbed by the gradual breaking of his heart. Bertolucci begins with a story so simple (which is to say, so stripped of any clutter of plot) that there is little room in it for anything but the emotional crisis of his hero.
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