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From Schoenberg’s one-act homonymous opera (1929) - the music is frightening and catastrophic as a counterpoint to a libretto (written by his wife, Gertrud Schoenberg, under the pseudonym “Max Blonda”) which tells the story of a marital dispute that culminates in reconciliation - Straub–Huillet make a unique musical comedy (as an echo of the Hollywood comedy born from European exile, particularly that of Ernst Lubitsch), with a great rigorous work on space (a perfect balance between theatrical abstraction and naturalism in cinema: “a space which is not entirely naturalistic or entirely abstract, nor entirely mundane or entirely theatrical, somewhere between the two” , Straub dixit) and the exterior. This is a film about love and fidelity - between couples (the Schoenbergs, the Straubs and another couple) - but also, and above all, artistic, ethical and political fidelity.