Freely based on Gide ('Paludes') and Hawthorne ('Wakefield'), this is a film about a writer who never wrote anything and who blows at nightfall the breath of frost. The poem by Carlos Queiroz to which the above sentences belong is not cited in 'O som da Terra a Tremer', but the atmosphere is that, between written letters never received. Fiction within fiction, stories within stories, like those Chinese boxes in which there is always one inside another. Or the two margins of the same river, always being lateral.

A sickly young girl is given away by her father to a childless couple. Twenty years later, she marries her adopted father.

Paul and Rene, two men in their forties weary with life. One a widower, the other is divorced and pays alimony to his ex-wife. They live together, go on vacations together. This last vacation has been a washout and so is their return.

A newspaper reporter comes across a man and woman arguing on the beach, and after obligingly driving the woman around when she seeks him out, he takes her back to discover that the man has been murdered. The woman takes off, but the reporter, after many twists and turns, runs into her on a train. They start a relationship, but he had better pay closer attention to how he got to know her in the first place.