Three Lives and Only One Death

Pierre Bellemare frames the film by introducing four strange tales that form its narrative backbone. He sets up a framing device that blurs the lines between storyteller and story. This narration primes the audience for the surreal, interconnected fates to come.

Andre Parisi wakes up with a terrible headache and heads to a local cafe. There he meets Matteo Strano, who is eager to hear his story. The encounter sets the stage for the first tale to unfold.

Matteo offers 1000 francs and champagne to listen to his tale, establishing a transactional aura around storytelling. He also reveals he was once married to Andre's wife, hinting at a web of personal connections. Andre's curiosity is piqued, even as unease grows.

Matteo recounts a strange journey in time, renting an apartment believed to be inhabited by fairies that eat time. The fairies allegedly devoured twenty years of Matteo's life in a single night. The tale is presented as both lure and warning about the price of shortcuts through time.

Andre accompanies Matteo and discovers the apartment actually exists and matches the eerie story. Matteo treats Andre's fascination as an implicit acceptance of a deal that would let Matteo go home. This leaves Andre to remain trapped in the bewitched space.

When Andre refuses to swap places, he wakes with a hammer in his head. The blow retroactively frames his headache as a premonition of the dangers within Matteo's bargain. The scene tightens the sense that reality may be slipping.

Two decades pass and Matteo returns to his former home and his former wife Maria as if nothing has changed. The return deepens the entwined fates and signals the persistence of the time-eating curse. The boundaries between life courses become increasingly porous.

George Vickers, a 69-year-old professor, ascends the Sorbonne's main stairs for a conference and is seized by a strange force. He is drawn to a graveyard, experiences grief, and then bursts into inexplicable happiness. The sequence propels him into an unusual arc where fortune shifts dramatically.

On a routine walk home he is ambushed but saved by Tanya La Corse. She takes him to her apartment, where he encounters books by Carlos Castañeda and sometimes hears Carlos's voice. Vickers feels a mix of loathing and intrigue toward these rival voices and the new friendship.

Vickers and Tanya/Maria deepen their bond and even move closer, while the revelation emerges that she led a double life as the president of a vast electric company and had been drawn into prostitution by her husband. The interlacing lives blur professional, personal, and criminal lines. The friendship intensifies the sense that all identities may be malleable.

Vickers and Tanya/Maria marry, yet time keeps looping: Vickers repeats the ascent of the Sorbonne stairs, pauses, and drifts toward the graveyard. Tanya/Maria's ex-husband returns to rekindle her darker desires, triggering a flip back to the Beggar/Prostitute dynamic. The cycle underscores the inescapability of their intertwined fates.

Cecile and Martin begin a blissful life after receiving a mysterious weekly gift of 2,000 francs. They embark on affairs with Piotr and with Cecile's own mother Maria, testing loyalty as their world grows increasingly tangled. The generosity that sparked happiness starts to erode under the weight of shared secrets.

The protector dies and leaves the couple a mansion, along with a butler who only answers to a bell. The butler drugs them and prolongs their sleep, manipulating their sense of reality. In a brutal twist, the butler claims their newborn child, leaving the home with a haunting sense of vanishing family.

Luc Allamand, a successful businessman, receives a midnight call announcing his non-existent family—an invention for business purposes. He discovers his wife with her accompanist while Carlos's whisper threads through the night, sending him into sleepwalking. In the end, all of Mastroianni's personas converge in a cafe, culminating in a series of deaths.