A young British woman is hired as a governess by a wealthy Argentine family. Through her position, she slowly sees how the upper class of society is slowly crumbling, and how a fascist movement is preparing to install itself in power.

In the aftermath of the May Revolution, which sparked the end of Spanish colonial rule and the establishment of the first independent government in Buenos Aires, revolutionary leader Juan José Castelli is given the order to oversee the execution of former viceroy Santiago de Liniers. This pushes Castelli into a deep moral conflict, forcing him to confront the tension between revolutionary justice and personal conscience, as well as the human cost of political change.

Love of great literature is one of the outstanding features of South American culture. This Argentine drama, mixes imagination and "reality" and includes a film-within-a-film story about making a film about Kafka. The writer Franz Kafka (1883-1924) was born to a German Jewish family in Czechoslovakia. In an uncanny way which prefigured the Holocaust, Kafka wrote about absurd, terrifying situations taking place in a nihilistic universe in which almost everyone can be considered a victim. The movie explores his romantic and intellectual life before he died at age 41 of tuberculosis. Sigmund Freud, whom Kafka never actually met, makes an appearance in the story. The film-within-a-film has an Argentine movie director travel to Prague to try and produce a film there about Kafka's loves, only to discover that the studio there is busy filming Amadeus. Though these elements are confusing to read about, some reviewers felt that the director somehow made a coherent and enjoyable film out of them.