This movie is a screen adaptation of the eponymous play by Horia Lovinescu. It follows a "bourgeois" family as it copes with the emerging communist regime. Different members of the family take different paths.

Based on a story by A. Lungu. Returning from a business trip, Andrei hurries to meet his beloved wife. But everyone he asks about his wife's whereabouts replies, "She left with the new agronomist." Andrei is tormented by jealousy, but it soon becomes clear that the new agronomist is a woman.