In 1937, the young French engineer Jo Dupuche landed a job in Ecuador, with the promise of a better life. While he stops on a Caribbean island, he discovers that the mine where he was hired has gone bankrupt and finds himself penniless. Trapped with his wife in the tropics, the couple must cope. While his wife finds work thanks to white settlers, Jo is housed in a ghetto where he forms a romantic relationship with a young prostitute. Shot on 35mm in Cuba at the end of the 1980s with all the constraints inherent to the country, this TV film paints an uncompromising picture of colonialism in line with the eponymous novel by Simenon (1934).