Family man Govert Miereveld is a teacher at a girls' school, secretly in love with his pupil Fran. One day she disappears and his fancy becomes an obsession.
Mathias (Yves Montand) is a selfish professional who lives in Leuven with his wife Anne, who is more sensitive by nature. He rarely questions their relationship, which is clearly cracked. One evening, during a train journey, Anne mysteriously disappears.
In Antwerp during and after the Nazi occupation, a young woman, Lieve, is torn between her love for two men with opposite ideals: her Flemish nationalist husband Adriaan (Rutger Hauer), who goes off to fight with the German troops on the Eastern front, and a wounded French resistance
An author tells the background of one of her novels to a young filmmaker. The love story of the novel and the passion between the two artists interwine in a magic realistic style.
“Benvenuta is a film whose photography really struck me.”
André Delvaux's final feature film, based on the novel L'oeuvre au noir (Het hermetisch zwart/The Abyss) by Belgian-born novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, tells the story of Zeno, a doctor and alchemist whose quest for knowledge takes him around 16th-century Europe.