A mature woman, a martyr of the home, with a husband who has lost love and two children who are into something else, decides one day to rebel and try a new life with a much younger man.
Cora is a Mexican prostitute with typically inconsiderate johns. She is troubled by a hole in the ceiling. The hole triggers flashbacks regarding how she got to where she is; she hooked up with a gringo and got involved in digging a well. A horse thief given up for dead gives them a hand.
This routine drama set in Argentina during the 1930s draws parallels between a family patriarch and a political despot who stoops to any corrupt means to increase his power and wealth. The parallels are easy to make because the man is the same in both cases. The grandfather in the family has a rigid, tight-fisted control over his grandchildren, who eventually begin to rebel against his authoritarian and ironically puritanical behavior. At first, there is no real awareness of his opposite, criminal behavior outside the home. But as one of the grandsons begins to mature in his political savvy, the grandfather comes under well-deserved fire at last.