A psychological story about dissatisfied individuals who despise the stereotypes of others, but create their own. Kazan, a vagabond through life, and Viola, who always settles for the ideal, form a disparate pair who eventually find the one.

A political drama dealing with the issues of contemporary construction and highlighting the various relationships within the party apparatus.

Antonín Kachlík wanted to make committed films about the moral dilemmas of the working class, but in the era of normalisation, he could only proclaim how faltering individuals would eventually come to the desired thinking. This is also true of the adaptation of Jiří Švejda's book about the wavering career of a young brickmaking technologist - the simplistic drawing of characters and plots, the posterishly lifeless language and the textbook discussion of social ills are all objectionable; the ideal becomes the code of the socialist builder.