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.

Ernesto, a seven-year-old boy who has the body of a thirty-year-old man, decides, upon attending his first day of school, that he no longer wishes to attend, because he does not wish to be taught matters that he does not know.