Dialogue
An ex-convict struggles to survive by brute force alone in a turn-of-the-century slum in Bucharest. Codine is the thug who served 10 years for murdering a friend. He returns home to his miserly mother, whose penny-pinching ways infuriate her son. A young boy looks up to Codine, and through the man's eyes he sees the economic and social injustices from an adult perspective. When Codine kills another man who violated his trust, his mother becomes more unhinged and paranoid. Thinking her son will steal her hoarded money, she plots to kill her only son. The impressionable child watches in horror and amazement at the cruel machinations of the adult work that surrounds him.
Writer
Set during World War II in France, the story begins when a resistance fighter is given shelter in an asylum by a friend who manages the institution. Soon after, the manager is arrested by the Gestapo, which gets the resistance fighter involved. He finds the informer who set his friend up and kills him. But then no one will believe his story about the informer and he becomes desperate enough to start losing his own mental balance. A young doctor and the daughter of one of the inmates help him keep it together, but he knows he cannot continue like this for long.
