The film begins simply. Writer Alain Robbe-Grillet gets aboard the train with his wife (Catherine Robbe-Grillet, herself the author of the S&M classic L'IMAGE) and a film producer who then suggests they make a film using the train - the Trans-Europ-Express from Paris to Antwerp - as a setting with drug trafficking and rape. Off the top of his head, Robbe-Grillet voices the proposed scenario which features the actor Jean-Louis Trintignant (winking at the camera in his first close-up) as Elias buying a valise with a false bottom and heads to Antwerp to collect a shipment of cocaine. His journey is constantly rewritten and deconstructed by the three on the train who involve him with prostitutes, fake cops, bombs (early on, a rail yard is used to represent the scattered train compartments after an explosion accomplished in an intentionally artificial manner with an comic explosion optical effect). Just when things are moving straightforwards, the plot unravels as writer, producer, and secretary pick it apart. Eva (Marie-France Pisier) goes from being Elias' lover to his accomplice to his victim to a bondage show performer just as spies become undercover cops and Elias' smuggled cocaine appears, disappears, and changes substance. Crisply photographed in black and white by Wally Kurant (Godard's MASCULINE-FEMININE), TRANS-EUROP-EXPRESS has aged well. Its reflexive structure is perhaps not so impenetrable as it might have been to general audiences at the time but the unpredictability of the film's various twists and rewrites keeps things off-kilter and Trintignant is compulsively watchable (as he is in Robbe-Grillet's follow-up THE MAN WHO LIES where he plays a similarly mercurial character). Perhaps even more surprising for the time than the displays of female flesh is the frank though restrained depictions of bondage and sexual violence (in Italy, Robbe-Grillet was called to stand trial for pornography - it didn't help that the Italian distributors retitled the film A PELLE NUDA); fleshy but non-gratuitous elements which continued to infuse his subsequent works like EDEN AND AFTER, PROGRESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE, PLAYING WITH FIRE up to GRADIVA.