Manoel de Oliveira plays his film in three stages: the first part - a play, the second can be roughly defined as a silent film (with the behind the scenes read excerpts from Beckett works), but in the end the director brilliantly performs the same material of the avant-garde exercise. Surprisingly, a joke, repeated three times, each time everything sounds fresh and develops into an almost verbatim adaptation of the biblical "Book of Job" - a spectacular point in a parable about how hard to empathize with other people's misery, when you have your own.

After serving his sentence, a robber returns to his small, quiet hometown to retrieve the loot. But a ruthless Police inspector and his equally nasty young subordinate are after the criminal.

Shortly after murdering his professor, a young man encounters a sailor who offers him a position on his ship in exchange for 3 Danish crowns and his attention as he recounts his life story.