Demetrio Cultrera, Lando Buzzanca, is a young, wealthy Sicilian bachelor who becomes engaged to Rosalba Giordano, Catherine Spaak, the daughter of a local business owner at the Giordano Tuna Company. The pairing promises comfort, status, and a picture-perfect future, but the real dynamic between them soon begins to unfold in unexpected ways.
After their wedding, Rosalba’s outlook shifts dramatically. She starts to reshape Demetrio into the modern husband she imagines, hoping to mold him into a new kind of partner who embraces the trappings of contemporary life. Yet Demetrio’s reverence for traditional norms—his adherence to traditional gender roles and his preference for a more old‑fashioned, straightforward way of living—puts him at odds with her broader ambitions.
Rosalba’s attempts to shepherd him toward high society rituals, to broaden his horizons with enlightened tastes, or to adopt feminine habits fall flat and even irritate him. What she sees as progress feels to him like a loss of autonomy, sparking friction that neither can easily bridge. The more she pushes, the more the bond between them strains under the weight of conflicting visions for married life.
Driven by a desire to secure a stable relationship on his own terms, Demetrio makes a drastic, almost mythic move: he leaves for the Amazon, where he is offered a controversial option—he can choose and buy a new wife as a slave. The proposal is shocking, stark, and morally fraught, revealing the depths of the power dynamics that pressure him and the society that normalizes such choices.
From this harsh premise, Demetrio’s path leads to Manua, the young woman he selects for this forced companionship. Manua, played by Veronica Merin Veronica Merin, is portrayed as docile and compliant, and Demetrio trains her to perform the role he desires. He then proudly presents her to his circle of friends—and to Rosalba, his ex-wife—turning their meeting into a spectacle that draws curiosity and envy from those around them. Rosalba’s shade of resentment lingers, colored by the sense of betrayal and the shifting power dynamics that have replaced their former relationship.
As the narrative unfolds, the story probes what happens when control, desire, and social expectation collide. It examines how personal autonomy and romantic ideals collide with the pressures of wealth, status, and cultural norms. The result is a provocative look at relationships framed by ambition, conformity, and the costs of trying to rewrite a life to fit a singular vision.
In this world, every choice reverberates with consequence, and the distance between appearance and reality grows ever wider. Demetrio’s insistence on a life built on his terms meets a reality where power is exercised in unexpected ways, while Rosalba’s longing for a different partnership reveals the fragility of love when modernity clashes with tradition. The film remains a stark meditation on how people navigate love, control, and the evolving definitions of partnership in a society that constantly tests the boundaries between desire and duty.
