Trans-Europ-Express is a 1966 experimental film written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Marie-France Pisier. The title refers to the Trans Europ Express, an international rail network in Europe.
The story shows a creative team devising a film plot during a train journey to Antwerp. It is intercut with a film-within-a-film about a novice cocaine smuggler and a prostitute who enact their outline.
The film-within-the-film features a Frenchman named Elias who takes his first consignment of cocaine from Paris to Antwerp on the Trans Europ Express. There, he is passed from one mysterious intermediary to another, and with some time to spare, he enacts a rape fantasy with a prostitute called Eva. Eventually, he reaches his top contact, who reveals that his cargo is powdered sugar and that the whole exercise is to test his loyalty.
Told that his next assignment will be to take a shipment back to Paris, he looks up Eva for another session and discovers that she has betrayed him by informing the police. Initiating a bondage fantasy, he strangles her and immediately goes into hiding. Slipping out to buy a newspaper, he sees a report of the murder above an advertisement for a strip club where the star performer in a bondage fantasy resembles Eva. On arriving there, he is surrounded by police, but before they can arrest him, he is shot dead by his contact.
When the characters outside the film-within-the-film story return to Paris, one of them buys a newspaper, Elias and Eva are seen embracing behind them in the crowd; they then turn towards the camera as the film ends.
The Other Cinema 