She is young and pretty, a little mousy, with an artsy shock of hair. He is middle-aged, with severe, hawkish features, and is almost always formally dressed. She gigs as a model and shacks up with a volatile, once-notable artist who treats her callously. He is single, jobless but with a great deal of money, and spends his time collecting art and practicing the organ at the local church. His name is Charles, and her name is Lisa, and they seem to have met at a community art class where Charles is a student, painting, among other things, Lisa’s naked body.

But outside of class, for $100, Charles has Lisa come to his ornate home so that he may watch her—methodically, smilingly—fully disrobe. He can only last so long before he is overwhelmed, and he must escape to another room.

It’s a striptease, of course, though for Charles Bremer, the label is too crude. And since Charles is the protagonist, his is the point-of-view Dutch-Australian director Paul Cox has viewers co-engage with for the majority of the narrative; her disrobing is shown to the tune of an opera, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammemoor, as Lisa strips to her skivvies and beyond, and the camera cuts to a seated Charles, who looks increasingly perturbed by her gradual revelation. […]