[1][2] The film contains popular conventions of the photo-romance but also can be viewed as a parody of the Brazilian telenovela or melodrama and pop culture stereotypes.
The girl leaves her small town, grows into a beautiful woman, and starts searching for love and fulfillment in undesirable places.
The story is narrated off-screen, and the stills are intercut with film footage of a city landscape and dogs barking.
A main subject of this film is the relationship between stillness and movement and the repetitions of images, gestures and statements that are ironic yet believable.
[4] Ruiz made the film while taking a hiatus from making The Suspended Vocation (1978) during an actors' strike.
Returning to Monique's story; she has a television repairman, Henri (Eva Simonet), come over to her home to fix her TV.
One day at a park while Henri and Alice play ball, Monique kills herself and her three-year-old son.
Another break from still images comes an insert of a city street scene with cars and people passing by.
Repeating a similar scene from earlier in the film, a sick man in prison calls for Henri's help and they become sexually involved.
After work one night a man enters her home and kills her by hitting her over the head with a glass bottle as Henri did to Alice.
[5] The film consists of almost entirely still images with the exception of a few moments of footage of dogs barking in various locations and French city streets and neighborhoods.
Ruiz always includes academic aspects into his films therefore making all the form and content intentional rather than random, despite his confusing experimental tendencies.
Within this film, he creates a deliberate naivety for the narrator, emphasizing the ridiculous rhetoric that has become matter of fact for the characters.
[4] The movement of the plot also behaves casually, moving from Monique as a child to an adult without any ellipsis or cohesive transition.
It also ignores the lack of motivation for Henri to kill Alice and continues to lackadaisically move along to the next questionable plot point.
It reveals the melodrama genre as a formal mechanism by reducing the film's characters and plot to the status of necessary props.
Corpses can be seen in Ruiz films more often than not, notably in The Territory (1981), Treasure Island (1985), Three Lives and Only One Death (1996), Genealogies of a Crime (1997) and Shattered Image (1998).
Not only does it provide a break from the swift moving and ridiculous narrative, giving spectators a moment of sanity,[4] but it also serves as a commentary on the absurd lives of the characters.
The characters are always striving for attention and affection and their ridiculous rhetoric is just a bunch of useless noise, such as the barking of dogs.
The dogs' barking exemplifies their continued failed attempts to scream for attention and affection, that only results in the generation of noise.
The lack of moving footage is Ruiz's way of deconstructing performance, while making a critique on conventional melodramas.
The production companies for the film included Filmoblic and L’office de la Creation cinematographique.
The most common critique was that it wasn’t an accurate representation of his later and more mature work but it did provide a successfully humorous commentary on melodrama.