The heroine is condemned to her bed and the only link to the outer world is the telephone. Sokurov puts away all the dialogues, leaving us alone with her - living bones in an aesthetisized environment, and with the last aria of Traviata, supplicating for love and pardon. The exquisite coffin which is her home, is a metaphoric an spatial center of the picture. The actress in the coffin is a famous Russian ballerina, Alla Ossipenko. There is also a hint to the 'great disabled' Sara Bernard, who slept in a coffin, and also to the aesthetisized decadence as a whole, which converted death into a style of life. In Sokurov's film, the heroine communicating only with her telephone attracts this sphere, imperceptible, but saturated with threat. It is from this sphere that the murderer mate-rialised.