Guiliana is the wife of Ugo, a plant manager in Ravenna. Recently released from the hospital after a car accident, Giuliana is in dire straits mentally, but Ugo thinks she's just hysterical. When she meets the charming Corrado, he seems sympathetic, shares her feeling of being lost, but he doesn't fully understand and his amatory advances are not what she needs. Living in the shadow of industry, surrounded by the blighted landscape of the mechanized wasteland, Guiliana faces the full horror of existential doubt alone, and modernist culture offers her no solace, comfort, or concrete prescription to alleviate her anguish.