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.