Set in Hamburg's “Hell's Kitchen,” a waterfront milieu of gangsters, pimps, dealers and prostitutes, the story follows the attempts of an ex-seaman first to insinuate himself into the scene, and then to extricate himself from it.
The story, told partly in flashback to 1968, concerns a clique of English public schoolboys who bully and humiliate an unpopular younger pupil (Cox) who is 'bad at games'.
Faithful adaptation of a story by Tomasi di Lampedusa on the encounter between a man and a mermaid, for the television series Ten Italian directors, ten Italian short stories , in which Gianni Amelio, Luigi Comencini, Carlo Lizzani participated among others.