Marlon Brando plays Paul, an American expatriate whose wife has recently committed suicide. Maria Schneider is Jeanne, a young Frenchwoman engaged to be married to an earnest young filmmaker. When they meet by chance in an empty Paris apartment, Paul and Jeanne embark on an intense sexual relationship that obliterates the outside world each is hiding from. Bertolucci and Brando created controversy with their poignant vision of desire inflamed by grief.