Gráci has been recently released from a reformatory school. His old gang would like to involve him in a new action, but he hesitates. His past record is bad enough already, and he would not like to get into new trouble.

Károly Szakonyi's great play, The Transmission Error, could be set today. The story is about the Bódog family, where the main role is played by watching television, while the family members' attention to each other becomes superficial, their togetherness formalised without them realising the weight and tragedy of it.

A teenage boy, Bendegúz Regős, who has never succeeded at anything in his life and of whom the only thing people remember is: "I wish they had hanged you when you were two days old", drops out of school and is hired by his mother to be a cowherd with the help of a clutch. That's how he ends up with the harami-faced Bacter Szabo, who has to graze the cows by the railway. But even though Bendegúz is a well-meaning boy, he is usually "in trouble" by the time he has "finished his purpose...". The boy is subjected to a lot of humiliation, even if he has the sense to keep to himself. But his good humour never fails him. In the outskirts of Vecsés and Ferihegy, to make the cows fat, he is forced to graze in a forbidden area, which gets him a good beating from the peasants. But his life is made worse by his bacterial mother-in-law, the Stinky Witch, who turns even clean water into vinegar in his mouth. She is as flat as a flame from the front and as curvy as St. Gellert's Hill from the back.

Juli is a 17-year-old student who takes a summer job in a local chemical factory. She is befriended by Piri, a girl with an unsavory reputation who has worked there before. The two friends are ogled by male workers who have overactive libidos and imaginations. Juli spurns the advances of a deluded Romeo while Piri continues to work and endure open hostility from the older female workers while her slothful parents sink deeper into alcoholism.

This film describes the narrator's childhood, the years before and after the Hungarian Soviet Republic, in a burlesque and fabulous style and with the humour of a child's fantasy.