An adaptation of a Chekhov monologue about a hen-pecked schoolmaster forced by his domineering wife to lecture at a Women's Institute meeting on the evils of smoking, but instead finds himself looking back on his failed life.
Carmen, a journalist with two children, is on her third marriage, to Antonio, a record producer. Over the course of a year, we follow her through her discontents: Antonio's lateness, his fatigue when she wants to make love, his insistence on her company when she prefers solitude, his treating her work as less important than his, his casual and cruel dismissal of her opinions, her boss assigning her an incompetent editor, bartenders ignoring her, her passage into middle age.
This short fiction film tells the story of a very unusual satellite named Zenon. Zenon is a product of the most up-to-date technology and so displays an unusual characteristic for a computer: he is conscious.