This international production by well-known director Lina Wertmuller is a harrowing educational melodrama about the AIDS epidemic. The story follows John Knot (Rutger Hauer) a brash, cheerful American reporter, and Joelle (Nastassja Kinski), a new photographer he has had an affair with and (unbeknownst to him) a child as well. He has been having a lot of fun poking into anti-AIDS prejudice for a series by a Paris paper by pretending to have HIV and announcing this in various situations around Paris, which results in his being thrown out of restaurants, bars, and (in one scene) bed. He runs into Joelle on one these excursions, and discovers that he has a child and that he still cares for Joelle. Not long after that, he discovers that he really is HIV positive. This provokes a lot of soul-searching and anguish, right up to the story's unhappy ending.