TREATMENT
The film begins when
Nola, a working photographer, receives a call from a man referred to
as Traveler who’s interested in renting the lower apartment in
her duplex. She invites him to look at it, and he takes it on a whim
without question. The next night, her concentration is disrupted by
loud music coming from down below. She goes downstairs to complain and
when he opens the door, she finds he’s invited strange people
into his apartment and that, moreover, they are smoking from a hookah,
even after Nola had established a set of ground rules, including a no-smoking
rule. The next day, Traveler apologizes with a bouquet of flowers and
extends her a date invitation, which she accepts.
Nola recounts the events
of their date to her friends the next day over a shopping trip. It cuts
in flashback to their date. Traveler talks a lot about his experiences
abroad, and Nola proves herself an attentive audience. That night, after
they have “relations”, Traveler nonchalantly tells her that
he would like to shave her pubic region a certain way. Despite the shock
factor of the request, Nola complies.
The next day, she’s
at her job as a large-format printer for artists. She is working on
her current body of work consisting on mannequins poised in front of
backdrops of exotic destinations. Her mind begins to wander. The reality
of Traveler’s past is beginning to sink in and haunts her. Traveler
suddenly drops in and looks at her photos for the first time. He notices
that the backdrops are from various exotic locations, and begins to
ask Nola is she’s been to any of them. She becomes defensive,
though. He then takes her out to lunch, and she summons the courage
to ask him how many he’s been with. He is vague, which sets her
off.
That night, her friend
advises her that she needs to put some distance between herself and
Traveler in order to see things more clearly. Nola decides to take a
trip to the one destination Traveler admits he’s never been—Illinois.
The next day, we see her taping a note at his doorstep and leaving.
We then see her taking photos of Vermont landscapes. When she returns
home, Traveler is nowhere to be found.
The next day, she’s
at work, touching up a print of a plainly dressed mannequin in front
of a Vermont backdrop. There’s a rap at the window, and she looks
up to see Traveler. She greets him, and he whirls into his story about
how he couldn’t leave—that he was grounded by his anxiety,
that he suddenly felt physically sick at the thought of traveling alone.
In a flashback, we see him in the backseat of a cab, looking at his
reflection in the rearview mirror, noticing his receding hairline. Back
to his conversation with Nola, he hands her an address book.
It then cuts to Nola
in a diner with her friends. She pulls out the book he had given her.
She hands it to one of the women, who opens it to see a list of every
woman he’d been with. The women all discuss the stakes. One friend
thinks that his sharing this with her is the ultimate act of honesty,
and that it proves his maturity and seriousness in the relationship.
Another thinks that it’s jut downright creepy, and believes that
Nola needs a tamer catch. Nola then makes it clear that her intent is
to make a decision whether or not to stay with him.
The final scene is Nola
walking up to the gate of the duplex with a print sandwiched between
corrugated plastic tucked under her arm. We see a “for rent”
sign displayed in the window of the downstairs unit. Nola goes upstairs
and lies the print down on her table and begins to unwrap it. Suddenly,
a man comes up behind her and puts his arms around her from behind,
but we don’t see his face. The final shot is a close up on the
print, and it’s an enlarged photo of Nola and Traveler in front
of the Eiffel Tower.